The bodyguard and the beer girl.

It’s the name of the song William Prince is about to play. He wrote it, Prince [BSc/2018] tells the audience during this sold-out opening night of the Desautels Concert Hall, about a friendship that helped him navigate the unfamiliarity of university life.

Before he shared the stage with the likes of Willie Nelson, Prince played the role of bouncer at the old Wise Guys Bar on the UM campus, trying to find his path.

With his bandmates taking a breather, Prince is alone under the spotlight with his lyrics and guitar offering a small window into his world.

“We had every class together, time and time again / making dinner while we crammed for finals, it helped me understand,” he sings.

Prince continues, his cadence slow, his register low, shaped by a childhood of listening to Johnny Cash.

“Sitting in the Buller building, across the way to work / We went everywhere together, the bodyguard and the beer girl.”

The intimate moment reveals the magical relationship between performer and venue—and reminds us that a voice as powerful as Prince’s needs a stage to share it from.

Leading up to the fall opening of this 409-seat hall, Prof. Mel Braun, head of the Desautels Faculty of Music’s vocal program, said having a space tailored to performance was on his wish list for years.

“This is the piece that was missing.”

Glasses of champagne were raised at the Sept. 5 show in a toast to the new Fort Garry campus building that gives UM students and faculty a professional stage of their own, with state-of-the-art sound, and fills a gap in Winnipeg for sought-after, mid-sized venues.

Already, with the Opening Concert Series stretching into November, the contemporary space nestled behind historic Taché Hall is bringing the city’s arts scene to the university. The concert hall’s moveable towers and pivoting panels make for a unique configurable stage and acoustic system, designed for a range of performers—from solo vocalists to large orchestras, from operas to pop concerts, theatre actors to dance troupes.

Braun likens the new stage to “a runway into the profession.” Music student Brady Barrientos agrees.

“Performing creates this intimate, primal connection between you, your fellow performers, your accompanist, the audience, everybody in the room,” says Barrientos. “There’s also something cosmic about performing on a stage [like this one] that’s big in scale and production.”

On opening night, the late benefactor and businessman Marcel Desautels [BA (LatPh)/55, LLB/59, LLM/65, LLD (Hons)/99], who sang at weddings to pay his tuition and decades later donated $20 million to UM’s Faculty of Music, was top of mind. As was UM’s Carolyn Basha, a fundraiser and one of the hall’s biggest champions, who passed away in July, and whose music-loving family attended the grand opening.

Violin professor Oleg Pokhanovski and cello associate professor Minna Rose Chung perform on opening night

See and hear the Desautels Concert Hall for yourself

In this video series, listen in as two UM students fill the space with sound for the first time. Hear from professors about why this venue is a gamechanger. And discover why alum and donor Michael Nesbitt [BA/57, BComm/56, LLD/15] wanted to help make it possible.

Finishing touches that hit the right note

• With sound-absorbing curtains and reflector panels, the hall can be acoustically tuned and record live performances. The orchestra pit accommodates 48 musicians, with room for another 96 performers on stage.

• The hall’s grand piano, with its notable clarity, was courtesy of Shirley and William Loewen [CA/54]. Their daughter, May, says, “My dad and I were invited to the hall to see the piano in place and I played a song on it that my mom always loved. I was very thankful to be able to honour my mom’s gift that way.”

Opera soprano and alum Andriana Chuchman [BMus/04] takes the stage

• Gail Asper [BA/81, LLB/84, LLD/08]—an alum of UM’s Black Hole Theatre Company—gifted $2.5 million towards the build, as did Michael Nesbitt. He also loaned two significant art pieces. Check out the “Forever Bicycles” sculpture by the renown Ai Weiwei at the entrance outside—a contemplation of the communist restrictions in China. And in the glass-wrapped foyer, look up to see a Sol LeWitt wall-drawing, with its premise that people come together to bring an envelope of instructions to life (in this case UM School of Art students.)

• Patrons can browse the seat backs for sayings like “play me something” and “this strikes a chord” among the customized plaques honouring donors to the Take Your Seat campaign. (Donations of $1,000 and up will secure your spot.)

• With its nod to sustainability, the hall is on track to achieve LEED Silver designation. Its design is by Winnipeg’s Cibinel Architecture and Toronto’s Teeple Architects. Principals from both firms are UM grads: George Cibinel [BES/77] and Michael Robertson [BA/98, MArch/04] of Cibinel and Tomer Diamant [BEnvD/04] of Teeple.

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