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Key West Council On The Arts - Impromptu Classical Concerts of Key West
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IMPROMPTU CLASSICAL CONCERTS of KEY WEST Some Historical Notes
Music-lover Richard Lischer happened to be the owner of a popular restaurant in the heart of Key West - “The Buttery” by name. And in January of 1972 Richard happened to have a professional musician friend, a notable concert pianist, visiting with him at his Casa Gato home. His guest, in return for Richard’s hospitality, offered to give a concert as a “thank you” - a splendid idea, thought Richard.
The result: a special impromptu dinner and concert evening at The Buttery on January 6th, 1972, with some fifty dinner-buying attendees. Richard dubbed the event “The Twelfth Night,” little thinking this was to be the birth of the Impromptu Concerts series.
Among the impressed attendees was Raymond Weiss, owner of a concert-artist management agency in New York City, with a home in Key West. An informal partnership, Raymond and Richard, developed - offering concerts not only when Richard’s musical friends were visiting, but also whenever a Weiss client chanced to be playing in South Florida and could be induced to spend a few days in sunny Key West.
The first “impromptu” concerts were held at The Buttery, which soon moved to a larger space on Simonton Street. In due course, as audiences grew and the music appeared to be clearly the prime attraction, performances were moved to Richard’s living room at the historic Casa Gato building in Key West’s mid-town. The room offered not only a fine grand piano but also opened onto comfortable adjacent rooms for additional seating, with easy access to the opulently planted tropical Casa Gato atrium.
It turned out to be an ideal setting for what was now named “Impromptu Concerts” - classical music pure and simple -- and for the casual after-concert receptions in the atrium gardens, where concert-goers could sip champagne, enjoy Richard’s home-made chocolate cake, and meet the performers..
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In 1979 Impromptu Concerts took on the name “Key West Council on the Arts” as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. But the concerts remained “the Impromptu Concerts” to its steadily growing audiences.
Richard hosted the concerts for almost twenty years. But when, for personal reasons, he moved from the Casa Gato in 1992, the Impromptu Concerts needed a new venue. The living room of the Key West Womens Club was tried, but proved to be too small.. A more ample living room at the historic Little White House in Truman Annex was used for a year but was ultimately unable to cope with ever-increasing audiences. And in 1994, Impromptu Concerts moved to its present location, the significantly larger and eminently beautiful St Paul’s Church on Duval Street.
The church provided plenty of room for us to grow but it had a major problem: no piano. Whenever programming called for a piano, it had to be rented and moved in and out of the church, an expensive procedure that taxed our tight budgets. But could the Impromptu Concerts possibly raise the money for a new, high-quality concert grand piano? And where could we store it? The church cooperated from the start, agreeing to store a new Impromptu Concerts piano at no cost between concerts, provided it could be used for the church’s free lunchtime concerts.
Now all we needed was a major sum of money to buy the instrument.
Fundraising moved slowly for months - until Vera Schiff, a Key Wester with a great philanthropic interest in the performing arts, hosted two lavish and well-attended fundraisers at her home. Her efforts brought us $15,000 - whereupon the Community Foundation of the Florida Keys stepped forward with an interest-free loan for a further $15,000, a sum made available by private donors following Vera’s lead. Our superb Yamaha concert grand was finally installed in St. Paul’s in June of 1999. Interestingly, the savings over rental piano expenses enabled us to pay back the loan in just five years.
Also at this time, the much-admired Key West advertising agency of Willis & Company joined our donors’ efforts, not only designing an elegant new Impromptu Concerts logo and program-style but also preparing our ads and promotional material at no cost to us.
The Impromptu Concerts enterprise entered a Golden Age of popularity - offering world-class musical artists, provocative programming and a consistent level of perrformance quality never before available in Key West. Audiences grew in response.
A further reason for ever-larger attendance: our longtime policy of keeping admission prices as low as possible - in 2010, just $20 per person, with young people under nineteen entirely free. Such modest prices reflect, in great measure, the continuing financial support of our esteemed “Concerts Masters,” whose sponsorship of individual concerts does much to meet their costs - and also by important gifts and legacies which have funded our entire “Rising Star” and “From Florence With Love” concert series..
The time-honored “Impromptu Concerts” name became “Impromptu Classical Concerts,” adding a useful clarification. Our concerts have long been far from impromptu, of course, with most of our programming now actually requiring a two-year time-frame.
But “Impromptu” lives on in the minds of Key West concert-goers as a word meaning classical music of uncommon quality. That, we promise, will never change.
Joe Viana & Ray Baker
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Impromptu Classical Concerts of Key West - PO Box 6244, Key West, Fl 33041 / webdesign by Key West Jane
