Stewart Goodyear: Phoenix
Bright Shiny Things

Pianist Stewart Goodyear is a formidable talent. Not only does the Toronto-based, multi-Juno Award nominee possess the technical facility to handle the most conceivably difficult material, he's a composer of distinction too. On this solo piano release, Goodyear performs two pieces by Debussy, contemporary works by Jennifer Higdon and Anthony Davis, and two of his own compositions, Congotay and Panorama. Topping it off is a splendid treatment of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The album title and cover imagery, by the way, stem from the project having risen from the soundworld, gestures, and traditions of Franz Liszt, whose output encompassed original works and piano transcriptions of pieces by other composers.

Goodyear's appetite ranges widely, the pianist having issued recordings of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Rachmaninov, and Ravel. His recording of his own transcription of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker (Complete Ballet) was honoured as one of the best classical music recordings of 2015 by The New York Times. It hardly surprises that he would be up to the many challenges presented by the seven pieces on Phoenix.

Of course no one should be more capable of taking on the two Goodyear compositions than the pianist himself; in bookending the album, they impart a satisfying shape to the release too. The opening Congotay, issued last year as a single performed by quintet and now presented for the first time in a solo piano version, is an homage to Goodyear's half-Trinidadian heritage and draws for inspiration from the Jamaican folk style ‘mento.' Infectious rhythmic thrust drives a performance whose tremors of agitation perhaps derive from the title's meaning: in Goodyear's words, Congotay is a “Trinidadian expression that means that the time will come when individuals will have to pay for their misdeeds.” No matter: the engaging piece dazzles whatever the meaning, and the pianist's commanding realization sets the bar high early. At album's end, Panorama, a solo piano adaptation of the first movement from his piano-and-orchestra work Callaloo, may well have you thinking of Gershwin as it wends its spirited way through rollicking passages and swinging Caribbean-inflected parts.

Higdon's Secret and Glass Gardens exudes the kind of mystery and drama that makes it a natural lead-in to Debussy's La Cathedrale Engloutie. Composed in 2000 for the Van Cliburn Competition's American Composer Invitational, her nine-minute setting exudes the evocative wonder of a tone poem and places considerable technical demands on its interpreter. Needless to say, Goodyear essays the contemplative passages as expertly as the virtuosic ones, the result an engrossing creation that pulls the listener into its realm. No more than seconds are needed for La Cathedrale Engloutie to establish Debussy's signature soundworld, which Goodyear does handily in a fully invested treatment where every mystical detail is studiously ruminated over. As evocative is Davis's Middle Passage, though it's mercurial by comparison. The title originated from a poem by Robert Hayden having to do with slave ships making their way to the Americas and specifically its words “voyage through death to life upon these shores.” It hardly surprises that Davis's piece—an inspired selection by Goodyear—would be at times tumultuous, given the traumatizing implications of the subject matter. In contrast to the darkness Middle Passage grapples with in places, Debussy's L'isle Joyeuse serves as a playful antidote.

There's a simple and obvious reason why enduring works such as Pictures at an Exhibition and Stravinsky's Petrouchka are so effective in solo piano versions: melody. Across sixteen compact sections, Mussorgsky's opus teems with hummable parts, be it the grandeur of its opening “Promenade,” the nightmarish brooding of “The Gnome” and “The Old Castle,” the excitement of “Limoges. The Market (The Great News),” or the towering majesty of “The Great Gate of Kiev.” A few quibbles arise—Goodyear's propensity for a faster tempo than I'd prefer in a number of parts and a too-rapid transition from “The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba Yaga)” to “The Great Gate of Kiev”—but they're of the minor variety and hardly undermine the performance. Changes of mood, dynamics, and tempo happen fast, which makes for a treatment that's never less than compelling.

November 2021