Stewart Goodyear is ready to connect at Resonate festival
Pianist Stewart Goodyear may have a cleanshaven pate but he has just the right phrase for his upcoming Orlando performances: “It’s a letting-ourhair-down kind of thing.” I know what he means. Goodyear, who has earned critical acclaim around the globe, will headline the Orlando
Philharmonic Orchestra’s Resonate festival Feb. 3-7.
The festival is designed to be casual, like Goodyear says, a place to let your hair down. Attendance is limited at The Plaza Live, dress for comfort, and there’s plenty of time to chill at the bar between performances — and talk music or whatever.
Goodyear will be performing all five of Beethoven’s concertos with the orchestra over the festival’s three nights — something that’s rarely done — but the event will feature more intimate “second acts,” in which smaller crowd-pleasers such as “Fur Elise” and the “Moonlight Sonata” are on the program.
Those solos and chamber performances echo the salon recitals of centuries ago, the way music was performed for friends — and that’s the vibe Goodyear and the Philharmonic are striving to achieve. That feeling should hold especially true for those who attend all three nights of Resonate.
“The more we’re together, it’s like we’re performing among friends,” he says. “The audience is cheering us on, and we’re inspired to bring our very best.”
Making friends didn’t come easy to Goodyear as a youth, the son of a Bahamian mother and British father living in Toronto, Canada.
“I was painfully shy as a child,” says Goodyear, now 44. “Saying ‘hi’ to a stranger was a challenge for me. But I wanted to communicate; I wanted to make friends.”
He found an answer in music.
“Playing music for people broke the ice,” he says, in a phone conversation from his Toronto home.
And Beethoven captured his heart at an early age.
“My relationship with Beethoven began when I was about 3 years old,” he recalls. “Beethoven is what inspired me to be a musician. Listening to Beethoven really broke me out of the shy shell I had.”
Beethoven also was a connection to his father, who died of cancer a month before Goodyear was born.
“I knew my father through his record collection,” Goodyear says. Bob Dylan. Led Zeppelin. But also
“boxes of symphonies.” Tchaikovsky. And Beethoven.
In classical music, Goodyear “found such a freedom of expression that words can’t always convey,” he says. “Every symphony or any work conjures up different images — and none of them are wrong.”
As an adult, Goodyear has several times played all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas in a single day.
“I always find that sonatas were like a personal diary,” he said. “You’re seeing an intimate side of Beethoven.”
But the concertos, which will be the focal point of Resonate?
“The concerti are his public side,” says Goodyear.
They require the magic that is collaborative music-making.
“It’s a real give and take with [conductor] Eric Jacobsen and I communicating telepathically and receiving inspiration from the orchestra,” says Goodyear, who is the Philharmonic’s first artist-in-residence. “We’re all in this together.”
In the earlier concertos, the audience hears a “youthful exuberance that’s so delectable,” he says. As Beethoven matures, so does the music, leading up to Concerto No. 5, the grand finale.
“It’s a real tennis match of power that goes on between soloist and orchestra,” Goodyear says. “It’s a very theatrical conclusion.”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed travel, Goodyear was playing in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and across Europe. He recorded all of Beethoven’s concertos in 2018 in Wales.
“I am proud of those recordings, but I feel the way I play them in Florida may be a little different than I played them three years ago,” he says. “Just the fact that we have all been living through really trying times will add more layers to my interpretation.”
He’s counting on the Sunshine State to live up to its name and provide a respite from the virus-induced trials of the past years.
“I hope the weather is fabulous,” he says. “Being a Northern boy, the chance to get some vitamin D will be wonderful.”
Resonate
When: Feb. 3, 5 and 7. Concerto concerts are at 7 p.m. nightly, the salon-style concerts are at 9 p.m., with mingling in between. Where: The Plaza Live, 425 N. Bumby Ave. in Orlando Cost: $35 per concert, or $55 for two concerts on the same night, or $125 for all six concerts over the three nights. Students, educators, medicalfield workers and first responders are eligible for $10 tickets to each concert. Info: orlandophil.org/ resonate
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