USU's New Performance Hall to Open January 2006

On the night of the premiere performance, the glazed lobby of Utah State University's new Performance Hall will project a spotlight on the geometric 3-D sculpture that forms its interior wall, and light the plaza outside like a blazing lantern. The visually bewitched will then be led to the main door along one of the textured concrete pathways that radiates out from the entryway to the curb.

      

The moment they enter the hall, the 400 music patrons who purchase tickets to the concert will be sheltered from all distractions. Eighteen-inch-thick concrete walls, adjustable curtains and canopies will insulate them from all sound except for the poetic, energetic piano playing of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as he treats everyone in the audience to and acoustically sublime performance. Every seat in the house is situated for a shared understanding of why Bavouzet earned rave reviews for his performances with the Boston Symphony and London Philharmonic.

      

This attention to acoustical detail is exactly what donors Manon Caine Russell ’53 and her sister Kathryn Caine Wanlass ’38Att had in mind when they made the largest individual gift in university history. Deeply involved in the project from preliminary architectural planning to grand opening, the sisters envisioned a hall that would evoke the best in student and visiting performers, elevating the level of public performance for the enrichment of the entire region. Having grown up in Logan, Utah, in a highly educated and culturally sophisticated household, the sisters wanted to give students what their parents took great pains to instill in them a lifelong appreciation of the arts. Exposed to the most famous performers and artists of the day at a young age, they have traveled the world and patronized its most renowned concert halls and art museums.         

      

That knowledge is reflected in the Performance Hall itself. "A great performance hall has the same qualities as a fine instrument," says musician-in-residence Russell Fallstad. “The hall itself amplifies the sound, bringing the base, the treble and mid-ranges into perfect balance.”

 

As the violist in the Fry Street Quartet, Fallstad has performed on university

campuses nationwide and in Israel and Europe. He compares the Manon Caine Russell Kathryn Caine Wanlass Performance Hall to the chamber music hall in New York City’s Carnegie. “Our hall is a Stradivarius,” he says.

      

 Lead architect Vinicius Gorgati of Sasaki Associates, Inc., designed the building as if it were a public work of art. But instead of imposing an Egyptian- or Greco-Roman-influenced monument, he and his team of architects created an indigenous look. In a tribute to the distinctive scenery of Cache Valley, they wrapped the front facade in a wrinkled zinc skin that mimics the folds of the Bear River Mountains. “We wanted the hall to look like it grew out of the landscape,” says Gorgati’s colleague, master planner Ricardo Dumont. 

      

“The Performance Hall has a vulnerability, an openness, a delicacy to it,” says Ann Preston, the Bay Area artist commissioned to create a work of art for the building’s interior. “It doesn’t sit there like a bank or a city hall with four feet planted on the ground. It allows you to think your own thoughts and feel your own feelings.”

      

Inspired, Preston sculpted the lobby’s interior wall of the same materials that were used in the building’s construction. Slate- and cloud-colored concrete and stainless steel geometric forms engage in an intentional dialogue between the analytic and the perfect.

 

“There are harsh pieces and gentle pieces, sharp, angular forms and rippling liquid-like forms,” she says. “Each block contains a subset of another and is placed in a pattern that is proportionate to the golden mean. No two patterns repeat themselves but together they create a coherent unit that is comparable to the glory of music. Music is a series of mathematical resonances and I wanted to reflect that with a mathematical work.”           

      

This synergy between the created work of the Performance Hall and the creative artists who encounter it dovetails nicely with the sisters’ grand vision. The opening of the Performance Hall in January 2006 lays the cornerstone to the Caine School of the Arts, which promotes greater collaboration among the performance arts and other campus creative endeavors such as art, creative writing, interior design and landscape architecture. Just as the Performance Hall got Ann Preston to think about the relationship between music and math, a painting can inspire a poet; a guest lecturer, a graphic designer.

 

“People who have their heads and feet in the arts feed off of each other. It’s powerful, the impact,” says Professor Tom Peterson, the school’s director. The making of art is not an isolated act; it is influenced and nurtured by our environments.

      

The Performance Hall delineates the west side of a planned arts district. On the east side of the courtyard is the Daryl M. Chase Fine Arts Center that houses the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, and the departments of art, music, theatre arts, and landscape architecture and environmental planning. Someday, thanks to the example set by several decades worth of Caine Foundation gifts, the museum may be enlarged and space added to each of the academic departments.

      

While existing theatres and galleries in the Fine Arts Center will continue to showcase plays and art exhibits, as they have done for decades, the new hall will feature intimate concerts, performances and lectures. Sized for 22 musicians, the stage is perfectly scaled for chamber and folk music, jazz, presentations and dramatic readings.

        

As appreciative as anyone of the hall’s acoustical properties, music department chairman Bruce Saperston is also delighted with the results for practical reasons. “We had five faculty members and 60 students when the music wing of the Fine Arts Center was built in the mid-1960s. It had no performance hall. Since then the department has grown to over 300 students, 58 full- and part-time faculty and a resident string quartet.”

      

Cello major Tamra Bayles will be holding her senior recital in the hall. “For the first time in my life I will be able to play without worrying about whether the piano is drowning me out. The hall was designed to very high standards. I’m excited and nervous. It seems like I will be expected to be perfect and, of course, no performance is going to be perfect.”

      

Bayles’ cello instructor, Anne Francis of the Fry Street Quartet, reassures her. “In an intimate, beautifully tuned space like this, you can focus on what the composer intended to communicate, and your interpretation of that, and let everything else go. You can connect with your audience on a deep level.”

      

You put in all these hours, says piano major Stephanie Chambers, you practice and practice, attend one rehearsal after another, and then you pour your heart and soul into your performance. But none of that matters very much if the music fades into the walls never to be heard again, which is what happens in an average hall. “A hall with good acoustics, on the other hand, can actually change the sound waves so that they resonate and vibrate and create a rainbow effect.”

      

Built of materials that will also endure, the Performance Hall will weather the changing of seasons, renewing itself every spring as the intensifying radiance of the sun and budding of trees energize the zinc skin.