Pianist
Stewart Goodyear has performed with orchestras around North America and beyond. He is also known for his periodic performances of all of
Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas within a single day.
Goodyear was born in February of 1978 in Toronto.
Goodyear's father died before he was born, but he inherited his father's record collection, which included works by
Beethoven, and when he heard those, although he was quite young, he resolved to become a classical musician.
Goodyear attended an all-male choir school in Toronto, taking piano lessons and general music instruction. He attended the Glenn Gould School at Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music, graduating at 15. That year, he appeared on the
American Piano Classics album issued by the
Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. He went on for a bachelor's degree to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where his teachers included
Leon Fleisher,
Gary Graffman, and
Claude Frank.
Goodyear earned a master's degree at the Juilliard School in New York, studying with
Oxana Yablonskaya.
Goodyear has appeared with the
Chicago Symphony, the
Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the
Frankfurt Radio Symphony, as well as orchestras around Canada, among many other groups. In the early 2010s, he recorded a complete set of
Beethoven's sonatas for the Marquis Classics label, and he has continued to record for that label as well as for Steinway & Sons and for other labels. He has made a specialty of playing all 32
Beethoven sonatas in the space of a single day, a feat he has accomplished at Koerner Hall in Toronto, the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, and the Mondavi Center in California, among other venues.
Goodyear is also active as a composer and has written a Baby Shark Fugue, a piano-and-orchestra work called the Callaloo Suite, and a set of variations on
The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby. He admires
Leonard Bernstein as a performer who draws on both classical and vernacular sources, and he often improvises his own cadenzas in concerto performances.
Goodyear issued an album mixing his works with those of
Gershwin in
2019. He appeared on the U.S. Public Broadcasting System program Now Hear This, and he released a complete set of
Beethoven's piano concertos with the
BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 2020. The following year, he moved to the Bright Shiny Things label for the album
Phoenix, featuring works by
Debussy and
Mussorgsky. ~ James Manheim