Stewart Goodyear says he had to train like an athlete in preparation for his Beethoven marathon.Jennifer Roberts
Stewart Goodyear is a smallish man - it's unlikely that anyone would take him for a mountain climber. And Ottawa doesn't spring to mind as a good place to go mountain climbing.
But over the next five days, at the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival, Goodyear will bravely scale the heights of the solo piano repertoire. The 32-year-old Canadian pianist will perform all 32 of Beethoven's piano sonatas - about 10 hours of the most challenging and profound music ever written - over nine recitals.
He's young to attempt such a remarkable thing: Most of the pianists who have played Beethoven cycles have waited till they were older. (Artur Schnabel, the first to record all 32 sonatas, completed his cycle at the age of 53.) But Goodyear insists that he's "emotionally ready" to play all 32 sonatas. And, as he pointed out in a recent interview at Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music, he and Beethoven go back a long way.
"I first heard the Beethoven sonatas when I was five years old," recalls Goodyear. "I had coaxed my mom to go to the record store with me, and I saw a huge box full of LPs: Vladimir Ashkenazy's cycle. I was enamoured with the fact that each sonata had its own personality and was innovative in its own way."
Later, as a teenager, Goodyear was thrust into a kind of Beethoven boot camp at Philadelphia's elite Curtis Institute of Music. "My project with my teacher, Leon Fleisher, was to learn one sonata a week, so by the time the school year was over, I had learned all 32. For the 'Hammerklavier' sonata - which is 40 minutes long - he gave me two weeks."
For the past decade, the Toronto native has lived in New York and has built a busy concert career. He's played with most of the big American orchestras, with concerto gigs in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, among others. He's often appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and toured with the orchestra to Korea, Japan and China this spring.
Goodyear isn't an easy musician to pigeonhole. He's both a pianist and a composer, and a skilled improviser to boot. His repertoire spans the gamut from Gershwin to Mendelssohn, Ravel and Shostakovich. (He can be heard and seen on YouTube playing Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, and also Johann Strauss Jr.'s Blue Danube Waltz.) Although he often includes Beethoven sonatas in his recitals, he's not known as a Beethoven specialist.
"I'd be very curious to know what kind of pianist people think I am!" he says with a laugh. "I don't know if people think I'm one kind of pianist or many. But my Beethoven project isn't a conscious attempt to present myself to the world as a certain kind of pianist. There was no choice for me - I felt compelled to do this cycle. It's something that I just have to do."
His compulsion led him to the door of Ottawa's huge annual chamber-music festival. Organizers liked the idea - although they balked at Goodyear's bold proposal to play all 32 Beethoven sonatas in a single weekend, preferring to stretch the recitals over five days. Then Goodyear set about preparing himself for his Herculean task.
"Physically," he explains, "I trained like an athlete, building up stamina and strength so I could play all 32 in one day. I learned them so thoroughly I could play them in my sleep. It's like the Method acting made famous by Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Sydney Poitier: learning the words so thoroughly that you become the character."
He also listened closely to recordings by some of the pianists who have recorded Beethoven cycles - although he's quick to deny that he's modelled his interpretations on anyone else's. "What I love about the richness of the recorded legacy is that there's no single ideal interpretation," he says. "When you're listening, you may feel that you've found an ideal, but that's the power of persuasion."
As for his own recording ambitions, Goodyear has recently recorded the late Beethoven sonatas for the Marquis Classics label. (The official release of the CD is Aug, 31, but patrons at the Ottawa festival will be able to purchase advance copies.) Does he intend to eventually record a complete cycle? "Yes," he replies with confidence. "This is definitely the beginning of something."
First, however, he has to survive the next five days, in the hopes of making a mark on the classical-music world as an interpreter of Beethoven. "If people start to call me a Beethoven specialist," he remarks, "I would be the happiest man in the world. To me, he represents all human emotions - every layer of humanity is explored and dissected in the sonatas. To have people think that I've made a convincing case out of every sonata would please me greatly."
Stewart Goodyear performs from Tuesday through Saturday at the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival.
Special to The Globe and Mail