Great news for the arts in Utah Valley

It’s been a good day for the arts in Utah Valley, and both of the events that I’m going to mention have links to Utah Valley University, which is located just a few blocks from my house — considerably closer than is Brigham Young University, where I work.

I think that it’s now okay to publicly mention the fact that the very large and beautiful home of our late friend (and former Relief Society president) Melanie Bastian is to be transformed into the art museum of Utah Valley University.  (Before she built her vastly larger home, when we first moved into ours, she lived just a few doors from us on our same street.  She was the first person to bring us a plate of cookies and to welcome us into the neighborhood.  We miss her very much.)

The gift of this home to become an art museum is a remarkably generous act on the part of her four sons, and it’s a very fitting tribute to their mother.  Furthermore, it will be a major asset to the community, a real gem.

The reason that I can mention it today is that there was a reception at her home this evening for people in the immediate community.  So this upcoming transformation — the museum will probably open in mid-2020 — is no longer a secret.

It will be very fun for my wife and me to have an art museum literally just around the corner.

***

We were unable to attend the reception tonight, though, because there was another competing event at the home of our friends Jeri and Stephen Covey.

They hosted a salon featuring a string quartet made up of four principal players from the Utah Symphony.  The occasion was to call attention to the fact that the Utah Symphony will soon take up part-time residence at the new Noorda Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of Utah Valley University, which will be more or less open in January but which will evidently open formally in March with (among other things) an inaugural performance by the Symphony.  As the president and CEO of Utah Symphony/Utah Opera, Paul Meecham, put it tonight, they’re trying to make the community aware that they will now be a “regular presence” in Utah Valley, performing six annual concerts in the new facility.

Accordingly, people like Richard Brunst, the mayor of Orem, and Andy Noorda were there tonight, as was Astrid Tuminez, the new president of UVU (whom I first met when she was a student at BYU).  So was Thierry Fischer, the French-Swiss music director of the Utah Symphony, who offered a brief account of his coming to Utah, including a tribute to the late Maurice Abravanel and to Utah’s powder snow.

It was a pleasure to hear such a fine string quartet — two of them originally from Texas, one from Oklahoma, and the fourth from Paris, France — in the kind of environment for which string quartets and the music they typically play were created: namely, a home.  (Incidentally, one of them, their cellist, got off a good joke:  He’s not only a cellist himself but he’s married to a professional cellist, and, he said, such people who marry within the same section of an orchestra are called homosectionals.)

They began with the first movement of an unfinished Schubert symphony, and then continued with the second movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 2.  After that, they performed a quartet by the famed operatic composer Puccini, a real tear-jerker, following that up with a return to the fourth movement of that same Beethoven piece.  After sustained applause, they offered a little musical bonbon, as they called it, of which I never heard the name.

Anyhow, the music was excellent, the refreshments were marvelous — the bread pudding was, as the saying goes, “to die for” — and I very pleased that Utah Valley (in fact, to be fully accurate, virtually our back yard) will shortly be receiving both a new art museum and the part-time but regular residence of a fine professional symphony orchestra.