China's interest in Western music sweet note for Quebec company

SAINT-HYACINTHE, QUE. -- It was tea with Madame Shen that laid the groundwork for Casavant Frères Inc.'s cracking the Chinese market.

Casavant owner Bertin Nadeau was in Beijing on business four years ago when his curiosity was piqued by a photo of a concert-hall organ in a local listing of arts and entertainment events.

Excited, he dashed to the hotel's business centre and asked the staff to call the dozen or so concert halls listed in the booklet. It turned out that three of them boasted a pipe organ. He arranged a meeting with the manager of one hall who showed him their rundown American-made model purchased in the 1990s.

"If you want to know more about the state of pipe organs in China you must meet Madame Shen, who teaches organ at the Beijing Academy of Music," the manager informed him

That evening, Mr. Nadeau found himself having tea with Fanxiu Shen, China's first ever organ professor. A teacher at the National Academy of Music in Beijing who studied in Vienna, she told him all about the flurry of showcase concert halls China was building under an ambitious cultural infrastructure program and a heightened interest in the Western musical canon.

Some European organ manufacturers were already making inroads. Germany's Orgelbau Klais had just won a big contract to build an organ for Beijing's Grand National Theatre.

And Austrian rival Rieger Orgelbau GmbH had landed a deal for a hall in Shanghai.

"I was taking all this in and saying to myself, 'Wow!,' " recalls Mr. Nadeau, who is spearheading a diversification away from church organs at the venerable Casavant, which for more than 160 years has been turning out its world renowned hand-crafted instruments on the same site in Saint-Hyacinthe, Que.

Mr. Nadeau immediately set to work raising Casavant's profile in China.

Four years later, persistence has paid off.

Casavant has bagged two contracts - valued at about $2-million each - to build two organs for symphony halls in the Middle Kingdom: the National Theatre of Ordos in Inner Mongolia and the Grand Theatre in Hefei, near Shanghai.

Winning over the Chinese took years of hard slogging. Mr. Nadeau, 68, made seven trips to China over three years, visiting cities that had major hall projects in the works.

Developing contacts with state and government officials of course was crucial, but so was cultivating relationships with the budding Chinese community of organists, and the consultants who provide their services to auditorium builders and government decision-makers.

Casavant also played up the value of its strong brand and worldwide reputation for industry leadership, Mr. Nadeau said. Its own website is now in three languages: English, French and Mandarin.

The company makes a point of selling on the quality of its product and shies away from winning against its German and Austrian rivals in China on price, Mr. Nadeau said.

The contract for Inner Mongolia's Ordos - a new city of 1.3 million people founded just eight years ago - came about as a result of a Web search by Casavant's Beijing-based representative, Chinese-born Katie Zhang.

Calls for bids are often posted on the Web, said Mr. Nadeau, on a tour of the complex of old factory buildings in Saint-Hyacinthe, about 50 kilometres east of Montreal, where pieces of the massive, 10-metre high, Ordos organ - slated for delivery in 2010 - are painstakingly being assembled.

Each piece for the Ordos instrument is tagged Opus 3885, meaning this is Casavant organ number 3,885, starting from Opus 1 all the way back in 1879.

The Ordos instrument will be a 56-stop, 3,989-pipe mechanical organ with a second console that is moveable on stage. It will require a 25-per-cent increase in the usual air pressure because it will be on a site about 2,000 metres above sea level, says Jean-Luc Hébert, Casavant's project director, an engineer who also plays the organ.

Mr. Nadeau - the veteran Quebec entrepreneur who once headed Unigesco, a holding company that was wound down in the 1990s - is proud of Casavant's record so far in China: of four bids, it has clinched two.

The soft-spoken owner and chairman of privately held Casavant realized he couldn't afford to miss out on what was happening in China. A key part of his growth strategy is to reduce dependence on the flat church market and tap into the global expansion of concert-hall construction, including the flurry of state-sponsored activity in China.

Casavant has for years made its bread and butter mainly from exports to U.S. churches. But the company - whose 90 skilled employees craft only about nine organs a year - is working harder to become a significant player in the concert-hall market.

In China, the approach is to work alongside the decision-makers and taste-makers as they become more conversant with the organ, Mr. Nadeau said.

"Being small and entrepreneurial allows you to be flexible, to learn as you go. When you're doing business in China, you have to be resourceful."