Musique Chez Nous concert series marks 35 years

By Gordon Lambie

The Musique Chez Nous concert series officially got started at the end of September with the annual Howard Brown Memorial Concert, but in many ways the shows begin Friday with a program from pianist Michel Franck. While Franck is the headliner, Music Department Chair Jack Eby said that there is another performer that members of the faculty are eager to hear from: the department’s recently refurbished Steinway piano. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful instrument, and an uncommon one,” Eby told The Record, explaining that there are few pianos like it in North America. The instrument was donated to the department in 1985 by the Bandeen family. “It was a sensational instrument then,” he continued. “We never heard it in its prime in Bandeen (hall) because by the time we moved in it already had ten years of hard labour on it.”
After a $26,000 makeover, paid for in part by the family and also with some of the funds from the sale of the university’s Knowlton campus, the instrument is essentially brand new. See full story in the Friday, Oct. 4 edition of The Record.

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