PHOENIX | CLASSICAL VOICE NORTH AMERICA

An Imaginative Pianist Hangs Mix Of Pictures At A Virtuosic Exhibition

By Esteban Meneses

Phoenix: Works by Anthony Davis, Claude Debussy, Stewart Goodyear, Jennifer Higdon, and Modest Mussorgsky. Stewart Goodyear, piano. Bright Shiny Things BSTD0154.

DIGITAL REVIEW – With Phoenix, Stewart Goodyear’s latest album (out via Bright Shiny Things), the pianist-composer from Toronto navigates a varied, and always challenging, program, albeit to mixed results. At the heart of it is a hefty dose of contemporary music — some 27 minutes, including two pieces by Goodyear himself that bookend the album — and an engaging Pictures at an Exhibition

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The album’s strongest point is Anthony Davis’ Middle Passage, with which Goodyear contributes to the documentation of contemporary piano music worthy of note, and with a great performance at that. Inspired by Robert Hayden’s imagistic 20th century poem of the same name — an unforgettable, brutal montage about the slave trade across the Atlantic — Davis’ 1983 piece employs a distressed, and distressing, harmonic language that is far removed from what we hear in the rest of Phoenix. From the first measures, Davis sets a tone of disquiet, but without giving it all away too soon.

He creates a feeling that something is awry. Percussive repetition in high and low notes and unnerving chromatic runs paint a soundtrack for the poem’s deponent (a witness), who reports from a cargo ship sailing from Guinea to Florida with some 500 slaves:

       “That there was hardly room ’tween-decks for half  

       the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;  

       that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh  

       and sucked the blood”

With Goodyear’s powerful grip over the keyboard and plangent attack — he is a Beethoven specialist after all — the pianist captures the sheer horror of Hayden’s lines with fine-tuned precision. It is a riveting performance of a dissonant and uncompromising piece that conjures an episode from a past not soon forgotten and nearly impossible to make peace with.