Stewart Goodyear in Koerner Hall (Photo: Lisa Sakulensky)
Picking up the phone on a rainy afternoon was pianist Stewart Goodyear to chat about his upcoming concert on Sunday, Dec. 4 at Koerner Hall. His recordings are so masculine I half-expected a voice coloured with gravel and a stiff upper lip.
Goodyear, after all, was the same pianist who became a human Beethoven-jukebox for an 11-hour Sonata-thon a few years back, with only a break for a Starbucks and a trip to the bathroom. Easy listening this was not. In fact, the audience barely made it out alive, but Goodyear was just fine.
He sits in that rarified club of pianists who refuse to succumb to the arms of full-time teaching positions after years of paying dues on the concert circuit. His tours are arduous and feature varied programs like Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker in New Jersey and Washington D.C. in Late December, followed by Rachmaninoff in Memphis, in January.
Before all that, he’ll be making a stop at RCM’s Koerner Hall, for a program of some of his most cherished and personally significant works; those which he grew up on. Bach, Beethoven (a Sonata of course), Chopin, and Tchaikovsky. “The program has huge significance for me, growing up in Canada, and is to me, a very Canadian program.”
Making it even more Canadian is the world premiere of a new 10-minute solo piano commission titled “Acabris! Acabras! Acabram!”.
I took a stab at pronouncing the title. Goodyear chuckled and seemed delighted to hear it out loud; like it made it more real somehow. “That’s right… you said it perfectly.”
Commissioned by Philip and Eli Taylor, Goodyear first met the famously arts-friendly philanthropists at a reception, after his Beethoven sonata-thon in 2011. He’s been a regular attendee at their Christmas parties ever since.
With Canada’s 150-year celebration, RCM has been flushing programs with Canadian works that speak to us on a national level, and Goodyear was up for the challenge.
Over the past five years, he has called Philadelphia home. When asked why he chooses to live in the U.S. over Canada, he paused. “It’s a strange way of thinking about it, but when I’m in Philadelphia, ideas for Canadian works develop better,” he said. “Being away just makes me yearn for what I love most about Canada.”
He recounted his experience watching the Tragically Hip concert live-broadcast in Kingston last summer. The concert became the embodiment of being Canadian. “It was a stadium, but it might as well have been a living room; among friends and family.”
After that experience, Goodyear wrestled with the idea of what a quintessentially Canadian composition sounds like. “It is an impossible question,” he said, “and for everybody, it would be something different.”
Looking for ideas to hang his commission on, he chose a French Canadian folktale called, “The Flying Canoe”. Hearing him tell it, it sounds eerily similar to the Faust mythos:
Eight French Canadian lumberjacks are working deep in the Canadian woods during the dead of winter. After weeks of cutting and shifting trees in total isolation, they become terribly homesick for their loved ones. By New Year’s Day, they get snowed-in, which makes them hanker for home even more. Jean-Baptiste, the head lumberjack, meets the Devil and who makes him an offer to fly them all home in a canoe to see their families. The caveat (this is the Devil, after all) is that they have to return in the canoe before dawn the next day, and cannot fly over any churches, or say the name of God.
Baptiste convinces the others, and they make the deal. With the magic incantation, “Acabris! Acabras! Acabram!,” the canoe leaps into the air launching the homesick lumberjacks back home to see their families for the night.
Once home, they celebrated their good fortune by getting blotto (as they do). In the morning, just before dawn, Baptiste is found by the other lumberjacks under a table still drunk from the night before. Worried he might let slip the name of God, they gag him just in case.
While flying home in the canoe, Baptiste jolts awake and spits out the gag blurting, “Mon Dieu”! The canoe plummets into the ground, and the Lumberjacks are never heard from again. That’s that.
The piece was further influenced by Goodyear’s experiences as a young boy growing up watching Canadian animation from the NFB. A quintessential polestar was “The Log Driver’s Waltz” by written by Wade Hemsworth. “I would see that over and over again, and the way it was animated inspired the colours and the harmonies that I came up with, as well as keeping the Canadian folk element and the themes.”
While known mainly as a pianist, composing and performing are equal passions for him. Goodyear described his compositional voice as primarily tonal, but “spiked by spices”. He originally developed this language while composing his first piano sonata at the age 19 and still composes the old-fashioned way with just a paper and pencil. “I need something tangible,” he quipped.
It’s been almost two years since Goodyear released the Nutcracker release on the Steinway label in 2015, and fans will be happy to hear he has been working on a new album of Ravel piano works for the Spring of 2017. It’s an unusual follow-up, but Goodyear said it represents a return to a composer he adored as a child. In particular, his sound world which is like no other. He described it as a soup of musical influences, which, like Goodyear himself, is a lot like his own modus operandi: intensely thoughtful, humble, and wildly individual. Qualities which not only make the young pianist an extraordinary musician, but a Canadian through-and-through.
Steward Goodyear will perform at 3 p.m. on Sunday, December 4th at Koerner Hall. For readers not able to make it out, the concert will be live streamed at www.rcmusic.ca/livestream.
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