IRENE BESSE CALLS IT A CAREER
CALGARIAN SYNONYMOUS WITH PIANOS EXITS RETAIL
It’s official: Calgary’s Piano Lady is calling it quits.
After more than 40 years in retail, Irene Besse is selling off more than $2 million in piano stock and putting the building that houses her big southeast store on the block. “It’s time,” Besse says. “With the changes that have come in marketing, I think it needs fresh eyes.”
With another birthday close by, plus the fact she recently had major surgery, Besse says she thought she might end up in the piano business until she dropped.
“Unfortunately, my husband did drop a year and a half ago, without warning. He never had a chance to smell the roses,” she says.
“So I need to do that. And I want to do it while I’m still able to.”
It’s been a “very good run,” Besse says, firmly pointing out, however, that even after closing up shop, she has no intention of diminishing her personal involvement in Calgary.
“I’m not going to disappear, that’s for sure,” she says, laughing.
Born just north of St. Albert, Besse has worked hard at facilitating the enjoyment of music for generations of music lovers and their families.
After receiving her musical training at the University of Alberta, Besse began her musical career as a teacher/performer who travelled as far as Europe and Japan giving classical and pop concerts on the organ.
Besse and her husband, Tom, moved to Calgary in 1964, where she eventually became house organist for Calgary Flames games during the first 10 years of the team’s existence.
“Then they wanted me to play rock and roll,” Besse recalls. “And since I’m not a very good rock and roller, I said ‘I know just the guy, and that’s Willy Joosen’ — and Willy’s been there ever since.”
Besse also enjoyed stints playing for Stampeders, Cannons and soccer games — and was, by her own account, “the first organist ever to play live at the Olympics in ’88.”
On a slightly smaller scale, Besse has performed for seniors in her large store’s concert hall, every six weeks for the past 25 years.
“They come by the busload,” she says. “It’s wonderful.” The seniors gig is just one aspect of the multi-faceted Besse’s wide sphere of participation in — and influence on — the musical life of Calgary.
Over the years, her name has become inextricably linked with almost any public performance in Calgary that requires a quality keyboard. And with many of the city’s top players, such as the young, internationally acclaimed Calgary pianist and Deutsche Grammophon recording star Jan Lisiecki, in whose prodigious early career Besse took an active interest.
“Irene Besse is an amazing person,” the 17-year-old Lisiecki says. “She is a true friend, someone who cares and gives without expecting anything in return.
“Her gift, the piano which I have at home right now, changed my life — I cannot imagine my life without it.”
Says Anne Lewis-Luppino, president and CEO of Besse’s longbeloved Calgary Philharmonic: “Irene’s been such a key contributor to the success of the orchestra. “She’s just been there for us at so many levels.”
Some of bigger-name pianos at Irene Besse Keyboards Ltd. — the Bechsteins, the Bluthners and the Fazioli — will go to Besse’s daughter and son-in-law, Nicole and Michael Lipnicki, who run their own business dealing in high-end instruments.
The rest will be priced to sell, Besse says, billing the imminent event as a “retiring, thank-youCalgary, close-out sale.”
Lauding the outgoing retailer as “a huge community partner, who has her fingers in everything musical in Calgary — from classical to hockey,” Stephen McHolm, head of the Honens International Piano Competition, admits his organization will miss working with Besse.
“But I know she’s going to continue being involved in music,” McHolm says.
“It’s in her blood. She can’t stop.”