What does a $225,000 piano sound like?
Toronto’s Tapestry Opera will test out grand gift with two benefit concerts
You expect to see a gleaming threemetre-long concert grand piano at Roy Thomson Hall or Koerner Hall. You don’t expect it in a modest studio performance space in the Distillery District.
Until two weeks ago, a pianist at Tapestry Opera’s Ernest Balmer Studio had to make do with a decadesold baby grand piano donated years ago by a big-hearted patron.
Now, that Heintzman has been replaced by the Rolls-Royce of concert instruments: a Viennese-made Bosendorfer Concert Grand 290 Imperial, worth about $225,000.
It, too, is a gift. Ottawa residents Ida Chen and Clarence Byrd, a couple who have made a very successful living producing accounting and tax textbooks, had bought the Bosendorfer for their cottage north of Ottawa 12 years ago, and were no longer able to play it as much as they would like. They asked the owner of the Toronto store where they had originally purchased the piano to help find it a new home.
Robert Lowrey Piano Experts, the Canadian dealer for Bosendorfer, reconditioned the piano before having it shipped down to the Distillery, where it had to be hoisted by crane through one of the Balmer Studio’s third-floor windows.
“The move cost us nearly as much as the new $20,000 piano we couldn’t afford to buy,” chuckled Michael Mori, Tapestry Opera’s artistic director, after builders had put the tall, double-hung window back into place.
But Mori can’t put a price tag on the transformative nature of this kind of gift. Tapestry now joins just a handful of indie venues where piano players can tickle world-class ivories — and it is only the second Bosendorfer concert grand in a public venue in the GTA. The other is St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church at King and Simcoe Sts., which purchased its pricey Viennese piano in 2011, after a two-year fundraising drive.
Thomas Guillot, the church manager at St Andrew’s, believes that having such a prestigious instrument has “helped a lot” in attracting top performers to the church’s weekly concert series. “It definitely makes a difference,” he says.
The Bosendorfer is 20 centimetres longer than the standard for concerthall pianos, made by Steinway & Sons in New York City and Hamburg, Germany. It has 97 keys instead of a piano’s usual 88. Numerous composers have written works to take advantage of the Imperial’s broad range, including the “Great Gate of Kiev” movement from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Finally, it produces a rich, resonant bass sound that many pianists find deeply seductive. Superstar tenor Placido Domingo once joked how pi- anists try to sound like singers, but, “Me, personally, I try to sound like a Bosendorfer.”
The Balmer Studio joins several places in the GTA where artists who can’t play Roy Thomson Hall can sit down at a top-level keyboard:
The Jazz Bistro on Victoria St. has a Steinway concert grand
The lobby lounge at the Shangri-La Hotel on University Ave. has an Italian-made Fazioli
Chalkers Pub on Marlee Ave. recently bought a high-end Shigeru Kawai grand piano
The Canadian Music Centre on St. Joseph St. bought a German Steigraeber & Söhne grand for its new performance space five years ago.
“The piano is an integral part of the CMC becoming a sought-after performance space,” says the Music Centre’s Will Callaghan.
That is Mori’s hope as well. Tap- estry Opera’s new Bosendorfer gets inaugurated on Wednesday, with two fundraising concerts at the Ernest Balmer Studio. The first, starting at 7 p.m., features young Canadian opera talents, including soprano Simone Osborne, who is currently singing the lead in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of The Elixir of Love.
The second concert, starting at 10 p.m., is all about the piano, featuring local jazz great Robi Botos and classical pianist Younggun Kim. Tickets for each concert are $30.
Mori says the fundraiser is Tapestry’s way of paying forward the incredible generosity of Byrd and Chen’s gift. The money raised will go to Doctors Without Borders and GlobalMedic for their ongoing disaster relief efforts. Concert and ticket details can be found at tapestryopera.com.