The Vancouver Chopin Society at Magee Theatre

For a number of years, the Vancouver Chopin Society has featured piano recitals with some of the greatest keyboard artists alive at Kerrisdale's Magee Theatre at 49th Avenue and Maple Street. Though not exactly a venue that carries the same audience recognition or prestige of The Playhouse, The Chan Centre or the Orpheum, Magee has a few unique advantages over its better known rivals. .

The theatre was opened in 2000 largely due to the active fundraising efforts of the students, parents and staff of Magee Secondary School spearheaded by former principal Eric Schiemann. The last of the great school theatres and auditoriums built in Vancouver, it is used primarily as a training facility for the school's Music and Theatre Departments, but it is also available much of the time as a facility for outside groups and productions. With 525 seats, it is a medium sized hall with a large performance stage and available orchestra pit. It has spacious and comfortable backstage dressing rooms as well as rehearsal and warm up space as required.

The theatre is run by senior students with standard professional lighting and sound equipment in the control booth above the entrance area. The seats are comfortable and easily accessible with good sightlines from every vantage point and the acoustics are excellent and without the downtown sirens cutting through the performances. There is a very large lobby where the Chopin Society holds its traditional and often lavish receptions for the audience and artists to meet one another at the conclusion of every performance. And the parking is free and close by.

For a highly professional facility with better than average audience access and location, this venue has often provoked a condescending and negative reaction from those who feel that unless it is the Chan, Orpheum or Queen Elizabeth Theatre, the experience must be at best, doubtful.

It might interest some of these sceptics to learn that a number of prominent artists, actors and musicians have been graduates of the school's performing arts and related programmes, including Judith Forst, Margot Kidder, Heather Thompson, Tom Northcott, Bing Thom, Raymond Chow and Dal Richards. And that the Chopin Society has introduced to Vancouver audiences on this stage pianists of the highest international calibre including first place winners, laureates and jury members of the Tschaikovsky and Chopin Interrnational Piano Competitions, among others.

We continue to make our concerts available to our audiences in various parts of the city, making regular use of the Vancouver Playhouse and the Chan Centre, but the Magee Theatre is our home.

By Don Mowatt - Arts Producer at the CBC in Vancouver from 1964 to1997. In 1997, he joined the UBC Faculty of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing, where he remained for nine years.

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