HOW We Got Started

The great pianist Arthur Rubinstein is really responsible for the creation of Piano Six and Piano Plus. Artistic Director and Founder Janina Fialkowska was his protégé. She once saw a large silver tray in his Paris piano studio inscribed with the names of countless small communities in Canada in which he had played. She realized that neither she nor her globe-trotting colleagues had been offered such opportunities to share their music with such a breadth of Canadian audiences.

Our History

Janina Fialkowska made it her mission to follow in Rubenstein's footsteps. To make this happen, she convinced five of Canada's top concert pianists - Marc-André Hamelin, Angela Hewitt, Jon Kimura Parker, Angela Cheng, and André Laplante - to join her in taking time off from their busy international careers to tour for Piano Six. Each artist toured for ten days each year, performing and teaching in schools, churches, and concert halls throughout Canada.

In order to make this unprecedented gift of music available to as many small communities as possible, all associated artists offered their services to Piano Six at a fraction of their usual fees. More remarkable still, they pledged their services for a period of ten years, so that the program would have a better chance of generating a lasting impact. Their mandate ended in May 2003.

Over the course of ten years, the six pianists made over 60 tours, and more than 100,000 classical music lovers in small towns and isolated communities thrilled to live performances by these stars of classical piano. Tens of thousands of local schoolchildren were able to hear and meet with Piano Six artists in their schools, and hundreds of young piano students and their teachers were able to benefit from the inspiring master classes and workshops that were a part of every tour.

Piano Plus = piano + strings + voice

Piano Plus is the new iteration of the incredibly successful Piano Six, which pianist Janina Fialkowska started in 1993. The Piano Plus artist roster has been expanded to include distinguished Canadian musicians from the worlds of strings and voice as well as piano. By increasing the scope, we will be able to bring our audiences a much broader range of the world's great music and offer coaching and inspiration to young musicians studying in a variety of disciplines.

Janina says, "Piano Plus is bringing the world's most thrilling music via some of the world's best performers to a vast and fascinating country. We have a job to do, to keep classical music alive, and to find even one more person who loves it as much as we do."

Great music + great performers + a great country = a lot of excitement!!