With any luck, I’ll be spending a cold Feb. 9 in the warmth of Koerner Hall, listening to a concert by Stewart Goodyear that should have taken place in 2020.
Had the concert taken place as originally scheduled — without the intervention of COVID-19 — I would have been listening to a Toronto pianist with an international career. As it is, unless something else happens, I’ll be listening to the same pianist, but this time also as the first artist in residence in the history of Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music.
It was the decision of Peter Simon, president and CEO of the conservatory, to offer the new appointment to a native Torontonian who began studying piano at the conservatory at the age of eight, with the man who is now dean of its Glenn Gould School, James Anagnoson.
Simon acknowledges that Goodyear isn’t the first active performing artist to have forged a partnership with the conservatory, citing more than 30 years during which the distinguished American pianist Leon Fleisher paid regular visits.
“Jim asked Leon to hear Stewart when he was 12,” Simon recalls. “Leon said that he didn’t usually teach students that young. Then he heard Stewart.”
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