Stewart Goodyear

Pianist Stewart Goodyear maintains an active schedule of concerto engagements with ensembles across North America and farther afield. He has also gained recognition for periodically presenting the full cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas inside a single day.

Born in Toronto during February 1978, Goodyear lost his father prior to his own arrival yet came into possession of the elder Goodyear’s record collection, which contained several Beethoven works. Exposure to those recordings at an early age prompted him to commit to a life in classical music. He received his initial training at an all-male choir school in Toronto, where he studied piano and general musicianship before entering the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Music. Completing that program at age 15, he made his first commercial appearance the same year on the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra’s album American Piano Classics. He next pursued a bachelor’s degree at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music under Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, and Claude Frank, then earned a master’s degree at New York’s Juilliard School with Oxana Yablonskaya.

His orchestral collaborations have included the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and numerous Canadian ensembles. In the early 2010s he recorded the complete Beethoven sonatas for Marquis Classics and has since continued to release recordings on that imprint as well as on Steinway & Sons and additional labels. A particular hallmark of his career remains the marathon traversal of all 32 sonatas within one day, an undertaking he has realized at Koerner Hall in Toronto, the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas, the Mondavi Center in California, and additional venues.

As a composer Goodyear has produced the Baby Shark Fugue, the piano-and-orchestra Callaloo Suite, and a set of variations on the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby. He cites Leonard Bernstein’s ability to synthesize classical and vernacular idioms as an ongoing influence and frequently supplies his own improvised cadenzas in concerto performances. In 2019 he issued an album juxtaposing his own compositions with music by Gershwin. He has appeared on the PBS series Now Hear This and, in 2020, released a complete recording of Beethoven’s piano concertos with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The following year he moved to the Bright Shiny Things label for the album Phoenix, which presents works by Debussy and Mussorgsky.