Stewart Goodyear
The Canadian Stewart Goodyear is successfully juggling the careers of pianist and composer, turning in an eclectic run of recordings, recitals and commissions. Upcoming works include a Wigmore Hall commission for solo piano, two orchestral works for children and a piece for cellist Inbal Segev as part of her ‘20 for 2020’ project.
Pianist and composer have had equal billing for me since the beginning. I was curious about orchestration since I was eight. I collected scores, the first being Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and just seeing the di erent timbres of the composers and how they arrived at their own distinctive sound was fascinating.
I attended a choir school in Toronto. So, the first compositions I wrote were choral motets. My debut was a Sunday mass where they performed my Ave Verum; I was thrilled by that.
I composed my First Sonata for my graduation recital. It was the first time I felt I was writing in a voice that was truly mine – the harmonic language and my own sense of lyricism started there.
I was lucky to study with wonderful piano teachers vastly di erent from each other. Leon Fleisher, Gary Gra man and Claude Frank were my teachers at the Curtis Institute. Oxana Yablonskaya was my teacher at the Juilliard School and she couldn’t be more di erent
than those three. I loved her way of singing on the keyboard and her way of breathing. Those were very important lessons for me.
I was delighted when the composer-performer renaissance happened. In New York I had a manager who would ask me ‘What are you? Are you a pianist, or a composer?’ Artists who performed their own music as well as music by other people had somehow lost fashion.
My Triple Concerto is a 17-minute capriccio. I wondered what would happen if three chamber musicians came together – not necessarily each being solo musicians, but a chamber trio acting as one entity. I didn’t make it easy on myself, but it was definitely a project that I thought I could have a lot of fun with. Opera is a form I would love to get my teeth into. My grandparents on my father’s side were real opera lovers, and every time I visited their place they were playing Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. I’d love to go back to choral writing as well.