Opinion | Toronto pianist Stewart Goodyear finds a special homecoming at the Royal Conservatory of Music

With any luck, I’ll be spending a cold Feb. 9 in the warmth of Koerner Hall, listening to a concert by Stewart Goodyear that should have taken place in 2020.

Had the concert taken place as originally scheduled — without the intervention of COVID-19 — I would have been listening to a Toronto pianist with an international career. As it is, unless something else happens, I’ll be listening to the same pianist, but this time also as the first artist in residence in the history of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music.

It was the decision of Peter Simon, president and CEO of the conservatory, to offer the new appointment to a native Torontonian who began studying piano at the conservatory at the age of eight, with the man who is now dean of its Glenn Gould School, James Anagnoson.

Simon acknowledges that Goodyear isn’t the first active performing artist to have forged a partnership with the conservatory, citing more than 30 years during which the distinguished American pianist Leon Fleisher paid regular visits.

“Jim asked Leon to hear Stewart when he was 12,” Simon recalls. “Leon said that he didn’t usually teach students that young. Then he heard Stewart.”

The rest, as they say, is history. The young Torontonian worked with Fleisher on both sides of the international border and went on to establish a solo career, distinguished by an unusual specialty, to play all 32 Beethoven sonatas in one day from memory.

I was full of skepticism before witnessing this seemingly impossible feat a few years ago at the Savannah Music Festival in Georgia. Then, like Leon Fleisher, I heard him.

The feat is just barely possible because he happens to be blessed with a photographic memory. Beyond that, he happens to be a sensitive interpretive artist. But why so much Beethoven?

“I was 30 and at a crossroads,” the pianist recalls. “I wasn’t happy about the way my career was going. I was playing pieces I didn’t really want to play. So I asked myself, what is your first love?”

When he answered the question, Goodyear went down to (the now defunct) Sam the Record Man on Yonge Street, bought Vladimir Ashkenazy’s complete recorded set of the sonatas and listened: “I started to learn them all. I didn’t just want to play a few sonatas. I felt they were a set.”

And so, having decided he had something personal to say about the music, he then decided to make a specialty of performing them all together.

Not in this coming February’s concert, however. Having already performed the complete cycle in Toronto, he proposed playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, something similarly improbable, instead.

It is thanks to Franz Liszt’s virtuoso transcription for piano that he can do this, although Beethoven’s prescribed four vocal soloists and chorus will also be along for the ride.

Liszt was, of course, famous as a composer as well as a pianist and it is in the same two roles that his Canadian colleague is following in his fingersteps, so to speak. If he began to be a pianist at the age of 8, he began to be a composer at the same age, writing a motet for his fellow students at St. Michael’s Choir School and later working with Samuel Dolin at the Royal Conservatory.

It was Dolin who encouraged him to stop sounding so much like Mendelssohn and start using 20th Century colours in his music, which he has reportedly done in his new Quintet.

The quintet was commissioned by Mervon Mehta, director of performing arts at the conservatory, for performance with the Penderecki String Quartet in that 2020 concert. And it is with the Penderecki that he plans finally to premiere it in February.

Although the music incorporates 12-tone technique, it is primarily tonal. In composition as well as in performance, Goodyear veers toward the mainstream.

“Stewart is a collaborative spirit — that’s gold for a concert presenter,” Mehta suggests. “He was one of the first pianists we presented at Koerner Hall when it opened and he has performed there more than any other artist.”

In his new role Goodyear anticipates, with Peter Simon’s encouragement, contributing to a variety of Royal Conservatory activities, from giving master classes to performing in Koerner Hall to supplying content for the conservatory’s certificate program.

“The search for the right person who could satisfy all aspects of the multi-faceted role as artist in residence was not an easy one,” Simon says. “Stewart is not only an active performer and composer — he is also a gifted communicator and teacher with keen insights into music. As an alumnus of the RCM he also understands our uncompromising pursuit of excellence. I could not be prouder that Stewart has come home.”