UMass Magazine Online

Summer 2003

Departments

Around the Pond

Features

The Vast Area of Small

Tiny couch potatoes

Pumped-up Roosters

The pervasive presence of microbes

At-risk Native Talk

Our giant in hedge funds

Around the Pond

INTRODUCING...the new & improved Bezanson




	Pianist Estela Olevsky and soprano Paulina Stark celebrate Bezanson Hall’s reopening. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

YOU'D NEVER KNOW, AS YOU stand in the newly enclosed lobby of Bezanson Hall, that this spot once resembled a forbidding subway station entrance. The renovated hall, with its expanses of pale maple interspersed with matte, linen-textured stainless steel is now warm and inviting – a civilized space, replacing the “new brutalist” raw concrete of the original 1972 hall, which was never intended as a performance space. The full house of 220 that celebrated the hall’s reopening with two concerts on April 13 was justifiably proud, because it was they who had subsidized its rebirth. Most were sitting in reupholstered plush burgundy seats that bore their own names as donors. Most generous were contributions from the Bezanson family, Falcetti Music and the Ernest M. May Foundation.

Named for former department head, the late Philip Bezanson, the hall has been made more accessible, with railings along the walls, spaces for wheelchairs, ramps to the parking lot and new signage. Flexible ceiling lighting gives the stage a highly professional look, and concert-going has been vastly improved by blocking out “sound leakage,” the distracting noises of instruments, voices and skateboards from outside the hall.

Fund-raising began when music department director of advancement Marilyn Kushick responded to former Chancellor David Scott’s 1998 challenge that if they raised $150,000 between February 1 and June 31, he would match it. “It was a gun to our heads,” said Kushick. They met the challenge, then raised enough to complete the $1,170,000 renovation.

The performers, music department faculty and students, were visibly delighted with the new space. Chancellor John Lombardi, speaking at a reception in the Fine Arts Center lobby, praised the “spectacular display of talent,” then pointed left and right to the concert hall and the Rand Theater: “There’s more work to be done. I hope to have another one of these when they do the renovations over here – and over here.”

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