The Prince George Conservatory of Music is on the homestretch of their fundraising effort to buy a new Yamaha C3X 6’1" grand piano worth more than $60,000 and there’s only $3,750 left to raise.
With a little help from arts patron Eli Klasner, who has pledged to match funds up to $5,000, the conservatory is hoping to conclude its fundraising efforts when their final student recital takes place on June 7.
“We’ve been working steadfastly the last couple of years to improve all the performing arts infrastructure here in Prince George and I like to think to great results,” said Klasner, who is also executive director at the Prince George & District Community Arts Council.
“For example, the Knox Performance Centre has just been such a smashing success and re-opening the Playhouse but we need to have those kinds of amenities that are important for the venues to bring them up to a professional level as well so that’s why I was excited to get behind the Bechstein piano restoration project while also making sure our local conservatory has a good professional quality instrument as well.”
Along with raising funds for professional performance-ready pianos, Klasner said the arts community is also raising funds to improve sound and lighting technology in local venues, including Theatre NorthWest, Knox Performance Centre and the Prince George Playhouse.
“The other part of this is that we are improving these facilities and these amenities and their infrastructure and government helps where it can, but I strongly believe that as a community we need to get behind it all and show our support financially for these improvements as well and I have always been a big fan of matching campaigns because it brings a competitive spirit to fundraising," he said.
"It becomes exciting, a little bit of a race and I would like to see more of that in Prince George. We have some fantastically generous people who always step right up to make a financial contribution but it’s a lot of fun when somebody’s able to say I’ll match dollar for dollar up to whatever amount that every anyone else is willing to give.”
Raising funds for the new instrument came about because the conservatory’s main performance piano is more than 30 years old and is coming to the end of its life despite regular maintenance and repairs.
This is a piano which has been heavily used in its 30 years by faculty and staff as well as numerous community groups including Nove Voce, the PG Symphony Orchestra, Trinity United Church, the PG and District Music Festival Association, Tapestry Singers and the BC Registered Music Teachers Association.
“The conservatory is inside the Trinity Church and our performance space is the same as the church sanctuary and the piano that’s in there belongs to the conservatory so the church uses it on Sunday but we use it throughout the week for lessons and any time we have a recital or one of our faculty performances and there are various choirs that use it throughout the week as well,” said Shoshanna Godber, artistic director at the Prince George Conservatory of Music.
“So that piano gets used pretty much every day and it’s been there for 30 years and it’s been a great piano but it’s just not as high quality as we need for the performances we want to present.”
The fundraising campaign started in the fall.
“And we weren’t sure if it was actually going to happen but the Prince George Community Foundation gave us a boost of $35,000 by way of a grant so that was huge step in the right direction,” Godber said.
The fundraiser includes the price of the piano, a humidity control system and a dolly to move it safely around the stage for $62,238.88 all in.
“This is a lot of money for us, we are a non-profit and although we have a maintenance fund to keep our instruments in shape, we don’t have a fund to buy something so big,” Godber said.
“If we did that we would have to increase music lesson prices to cover the cost so fundraising was definitely the way to go as we try to make our lessons and concerts as accessible as possible so that $35,0000 from the Community Foundation helped a lot and we felt like ‘OK, we can do this’ and we did apply for a few other grants that we didn’t get but we also had a big donation from P.S. Pianos, which is the local piano store in town and Peter Stevenson is also the local technician who works on our pianos.”
P.S. Pianos is donating $12,200 and Trinity United Church and Integris have each pledged $2,000.
To raise the remaining $11,000 the conservatory started the Sponsor a Key campaign where donors can sponsor a white key for $100 or a black key for $150 or a whole octave, including seven white and five black keys, for $1,450.
To date they have raised $6,850 and now Klasner has come in to close out the fundraiser.
“We’ll keep fundraising until our last recital on June 7 so anything that we manage to raise above that amount will be used to move the other piano into another studio, and if there’s extra after that we could also buy a cover for the new piano and we could also set aside more money for maintenance,” Godber said.
“Any money above the goal will be welcome and that would be amazing. It’s a gift for us but it’s also a piano that is used by so many groups in the community and I think that’s why the Community Foundation got behind it. I would like to say thank you to all of the groups and individuals who have supported us in this effort. All of it really helped. It’s not just a piano for us. It’s a piano for the whole community.”
To donate visit https://pgconservatory.ca/piano-key-sponsorship.
