It took eight people to carry the piano back into the theatre. They came in off Cedar Avenue in the small city of Trail, in the mountainous southeast corner of British Columbia, carrying a Steinway grand built around 1926, an instrument that had been part of the building for more than eighty years and had then been away for more than two. A technician named Matt Arnott, who had driven it home, spent the rest of the day underneath it, putting the action back in, setting the lid, and tuning it. By evening the thing was standing on the stage of the Charles Bailey Theatre again, in tune, in an empty hall.
The executive director of the Trail and District Arts Council, Amelia Ewart, had been teasing a detail all week. There was a surprise under the lid, she told the local paper, and she would not say what. It turned out to be colour. The underside of the lid came back a deep cherry red, so that when the lid is propped open the inside of the piano glows against the dark stage. The arts council’s own account describes the finish being revealed when the refinished instrument came home, after a top to bottom refinish in a shop five hundred kilometres away.
The bill for all of this is approaching ninety thousand dollars. The population of Trail, at the last national census, was 7,920.
That arithmetic is the real story here, and it is worth sitting with before anything else. Ninety thousand dollars is roughly what a small city of under eight thousand people decided one object was worth. Not a roof, not a boiler, not a parking lot. One piano. And the money did not arrive from a single donor with a naming claim. It came in layers, and the layers are documented, which is rare for a project this size.
The campaign was called Grand Again. Its stated goal was eighty two thousand dollars. By the spring of this year it had reached $64,312, and the breakdown of that figure tells you what fundraising in a town of this size actually looks like. Just under ten thousand dollars of it, $9,812, was individual donations: cheques and tap payments and cash in envelopes from people who go to concerts in that building. Another $54,500 came from three institutional sources, the Columbia Basin Trust, the Kootenay Savings Foundation and the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary. The rest came from events, which in practice means a room, a bar, a volunteer at the door and somebody playing something.
One of those individual donations was $3,000, from Linda and Raymond Masleck of nearby Warfield. They are not strangers to the building. Raymond Masleck has previously served as president of both the Trail Society for the Performing Arts and the arts council itself. He and his wife moved to the area decades ago. A gift of three thousand dollars is not transformative on its own, but against a line item of under ten thousand in individual giving, one couple putting in three is close to a third of everything the town’s own residents had contributed at that point, and it was reported locally as a moment that moved the campaign along.
Masleck is also the source of the most quotable thing anyone says about this instrument, and it needs handling carefully. According to him, the piano has been used regularly for professional concerts and for student events like the Kootenay Music Festival for more than eighty years, and the late Canadian pianist and composer Hagood Hardy, best known outside the country for an instrumental hit in the 1970s, once called it the best piano in any concert venue in Western Canada.
That is a wonderful line and it is almost certainly unverifiable. Hardy died years ago. There is no published assessment of his to check it against. What we have is one man’s recollection of what a visiting musician said about a piano in a hall in a smelter town, repeated in a local newspaper and then repeated again when the instrument came home. It should be read as exactly that, a recollection, not as a technical judgment on the record. What it does establish, reliably, is how the town thinks about the thing. People in Trail believe they have an unusually good piano. That belief is why there was ever a campaign at all.
The work itself went to Verhnjak Pianos, in Surrey, near Vancouver. The firm is in its fifties now. By its own account it was founded in 1974 by Karl Verhnjak, a lifelong musician, moved to its current premises in the late 1980s, and passed to his son Rod after Karl died unexpectedly in 2003. Rod’s son Brandon has worked there full time since 2018. That is three generations in one shop, and the shop describes itself as the largest rebuilding operation of its kind in Canada, which is its own claim rather than an independently measured one.
What the shop says about timescales explains a great deal about why Trail went more than two years without its piano. There is a two year wait list just to get work started, and a rebuild itself takes somewhere between eighteen and twenty four months. Those two numbers overlap in practice, but the point stands: you do not send a grand piano away and get it back in a season. You send it away and then you live without it for a long time, and you have to decide in advance that it is worth doing.
It is also worth being precise about what a rebuild means, because the word restoration gets used loosely and this was not a polish and a tune. The published description of the work covers three separate trades. The action and the tone were rebuilt. Structural repairs were carried out. The instrument was refinished from top to bottom.
A grand piano is in the region of ten thousand individual parts, most of them wood, felt and steel, held in a state of permanent tension. The strings pull against the frame with a combined force measured in tonnes. The felt on the hammers compacts over decades of being driven into wire until the tone goes hard and glassy. The leather and cloth in the action, the cluster of levers that turns a finger movement into a hammer strike, wear until the key feel goes vague and the repetition slows. The wooden block the tuning pins sit in can loosen, at which point the piano will not hold a tuning no matter who works on it. None of that is visible from the audience. All of it is why a hundred year old piano in regular use eventually stops being a usable concert instrument and becomes a piece of furniture that looks magnificent and disappoints every pianist who sits down at it.
There is also a question of whether a shop like that can be trusted with an instrument a town has raised ninety thousand dollars for, and the only honest answer is to look at what else it has done. The firm’s recent work includes rebuilding a 1978 Steinway concert grand for the Orpheum in Vancouver, a hall of nearly three thousand seats, and it reported that the instrument had gone back into concert use with good notices. That is a useful reference point. A theatre the size of the Bailey is not normally in the same market as a major city’s main concert hall, and in this case both ended up with their pianos in the same workshop.
Steinway’s own restoration literature is blunt about the philosophy involved. The company says a complete new action is fitted rather than the old one being repaired, that hardware is replaced with its own parts, and that replacing the soundboard, the large sheet of spruce that actually makes the sound, is often necessary to get the instrument’s voice back. Independent shops do not all work that way, and Verhnjak says it sources components, often made in Europe, that match the methods and materials used in vintage pianos rather than simply substituting modern equivalents. Either approach costs real money, which brings us to the choice at the centre of this story.
For ninety thousand dollars a theatre with 721 seats does not have to rebuild anything. It can buy a serviceable used grand, a decent instrument from a Japanese or German maker, and have change left over for a sound desk and a season of guest artists. For a good deal less than that it can buy something perfectly adequate for a jazz trio and a music festival’s piano class. Any arts administrator who has ever stared at a repair quote has run those numbers, and the numbers point the other way.
The arts council ran them and chose the piano it already had. The reason it gives is not acoustic, it is historical. Ewart has described the instrument as a very big part of the organisation’s history, and the ambition as restoring it so that it can be played for another hundred years. That is an argument about continuity rather than value for money. Generations of children in that part of the province have played their festival pieces on that specific piano. Replacing it with a better one would have been cheaper and would also have thrown away the only thing about it that could not be bought.
A newly rebuilt piano is also not finished when it arrives, which is the part audiences never see. New strings stretch, and go on stretching for months, so the tuning drifts faster than it will later. New felt on the hammers packs down unevenly under playing and has to be voiced, which means a technician working the hammer surfaces with needles until the tone evens out across eighty eight notes. A new action has to be regulated, every key’s depth and let off and repetition adjusted by hand, and it will need regulating again once it has been played in. The tuning Arnott did on the day the piano came back through the door was the first of many, not the last one.
That matters in a town where the instrument’s main users are not touring professionals. The piano’s documented history is a mixture of professional concerts and student performances, including the Kootenay Music Festival, the kind of regional event where children play a prepared piece in front of an adjudicator who writes comments on a sheet. A rebuilt action feels different under a small hand than a worn one does. The children who come through that hall over the next few years will be the first in roughly a generation to play the instrument in something close to the condition it left the factory in, and none of them will know that is what happened.
There is a quieter detail that shows how the town handled the gap. While the Steinway was away, the Bailey kept working, because a Brodmann piano was donated by the Trail and Castlegar branch of the provincial registered music teachers’ association. For two years and more, every concert, every student recital, every visiting act played on a stand in. Nobody shut the building. That is the unglamorous part of a project like this and it is the part that makes it survivable: a loaner piano, quietly provided by a professional body, so that the fundraising campaign had something to run alongside rather than a dark stage to apologise for.
It helps to know what kind of place is doing this. Trail sits on the Columbia River, hemmed in by mountains. Its economy has been organised for well over a century around one of the largest lead and zinc smelting operations in the world, which remains by a wide margin the region’s biggest employer with something close to eighteen hundred people on its books. This is an industrial town, not a resort, and the arts council runs a 721 seat hall in the middle of it.
Which makes the restored piano an interesting kind of commitment. A rebuilt concert grand is not a trophy you put in a cabinet. It is a reason to book the sort of act that needs one. It needs regulating as the new felt settles, it needs tuning before performances rather than twice a year, it needs humidity control in a building beside a river in a climate with real winters, and it will need a technician on call who understands what was done to it. The council has effectively taken on a maintenance obligation stretching decades, which is the hidden cost nobody puts in a fundraising total.
The campaign is not quite finished. Final costs were still being tallied when the instrument arrived, the total is approaching ninety thousand dollars against a goal of eighty two, and Ewart has said the community’s generosity has brought them very close while making it clear donations are still being taken. In other words the piano came home slightly before the money did, which is how most of these projects actually end, whatever the press release says.
What happens next is scheduled rather than done, and it is worth keeping those two things apart. The first person due to play the rebuilt Steinway in public is David Restivo, a pianist with a national award to his name, at a jazz concert at the end of this month, when the Bailey opens its jazz series. That performance has not happened. Anyone writing about this before then is writing about an empty hall.
And the empty hall is the better image anyway. One technician spent a day on his back underneath an instrument that was built when the town’s smelter was already old, putting back together something that had been in pieces in a workshop for two years, in a building paid for in ten dollar donations and three thousand dollar cheques and grants from regional trusts. By the time he finished, the piano was standing on the stage with its lid propped open and that unexpected cherry red glowing on the underside, in tune, with nobody in the seats and nobody playing it.
It had taken eight people to get it through the door. It will take one to find out whether the ninety thousand dollars was worth it.