The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor A rich piece of Flin Flon musical history came flourishing back to life in a performance that brought an awed R.H. Channing Auditorium audience to its feet. A Flin Flon Arts Council concert held last Friday, March 23, showcased the debut of its newly restored 1895 Steinway grand piano. 'It just roars now (and) the pianissimo _ the soft parts _ are coming out as clear as day,' said Tom Heine, an arts council volunteer who emceed the concert, attended by roughly 200 people. Older than Flin Flon itself, the piano is believed to arrived in the community in the 1940s, though it is not clear from where it was purchased. The piano has since supplied music for countless musical productions and ceremonies, perhaps most notably the long-defunct Flin Flon Glee Club's fondly remembered plays. But gradually falling into disrepair, the piano had not seen regular usage since about the mid-1990s. While the arts council received an offer to have the instrument replaced with a lower quality grand piano, Heine insisted funding be sought to rebuild the existing Steinway. 'I'd talk to just about anybody who would listen that this was a treasure,' he said. Deep pockets Someone with deep pockets evidently agreed. An anonymous local donor stepped forward with just over $30,000 for a complete, professional overhaul of the storied instrument. 'I'm amazed, grateful, thankful,' said Mark Kolt, one of two performers to tickle the ivories at the concert, of the donation. 'It's one of those little miracles that you just keep running into in Flin Flon. I mean, this is not the sort of thing you can ever count on happening and it happened, and it is truly a blessing for all of the musicians in the community.' Kolt _ City of Flin Flon administrator by day and musician by night _ got first crack at the restored piano as he performed the opening half of the concert. 'It plays really, really well,' he said. '...(it's) an instrument that sings, that you can tell stories with. You can do things with almost any piano, but a really good piano gives you so much more to work with. And this is a game-changer, I think, for pianists like myself, but (also) other people, young pianists who are coming up in the community. It gives them a sense of what the piano can do.' Performing timeless works by Franz Schubert and Modest Mussorgsky, Kolt, seated on a plush leather-seated bench, became one with the piano. His lightning-fast fingers caressed, sometimes pounded, the glistening keys with a level of mastery that comes only from decades of dedication. If he made even a single error in the thousands of notes he struck, only he noticed. See 'Spect...' on pg. 8 Continued from pg. 1 Without uttering a single word, he conveyed the spectrum of human emotions, from upbeat and energetic to heavyhearted and frantic. Accompanied early on by the powerful vocals of another local musician, Katrina Windjack, Kolt was followed in the second half by Winnipeg's Renate Rossol. See 'Award...' on pg. 9 Continued from pg. 8 Rossol, an award-winning pianist, revived the works of Franz Liszt, Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms with the smoothness of a lullaby. 'I thought it was a real pleasure to be a part of the Flin Flon milieu of art and to really premiere this instrument,' the University of Manitoba student said afterwards. Like Kolt, she observed how well the instrument plays, a comment that did not surprise Heine. 'Essentially it's been restored to 'as new' condition,' said Heine. The restoration process, completed by the renowned Roger Jolly of Saskatoon, took more than a year to complete. It included new strings and other innards, replacement key covers and a stripping and refinishing of the graceful black exterior. 'It looks brand new,' Heine said. That's a far cry from where the instrument was before the $30,000-plus investment. 'I can only wonder what condition it was in when it first got here, but it's had some real ups and downs in terms of its life,' observed Kolt. 'Until its most recent makeover, it was an instrument that didn't get a lot of love because it was really hard to play. You had to really press down hard on the keys.' Heine recalled one embarrassing incident when an outside conductor came to town and tried playing the piano. 'Some of the key covers came off,' he said. Now Heine won't have to worry about such incidents for a long time to come. 'When Mark was hammering on the last movements of the Mussorgsky, it was full coverage in the auditorium,' said Heine. 'The sound quality would have been equal throughout the auditorium. Right to the soft passages, everything comes out clear, it comes out correctly and it's just glorious to hear something like that.'
