At the Roy Barnett Recital Hall on Sunday, November 21

What used to be rather anonymously known as “the music building” or the UBC Recital Hall is now the Roy Barnett Recital Hall, Barnett being an alumnus of the university and music enthusiast who donated $2 million to UBC, half of which went to the restoration of its main music venue, the recital hall.

Barnett, 72, graduated in commerce in 1961 and is a former executive of the pharmaceutical company Novopharm (now Teva Canada).

He played the accordion until he was 18 but eventually tired of the idea of chugging out “Lady of Spain” for the rest of his life and turned to the piano.

His wife, Gunilla, deserves a solid mention since it was she who pushed Roy into taking lessons and even attending the Victoria Conservatory of Music well into his 60s. The switch to the piano, he says, was one of the best decisions he's ever made.

The venerable hall is the place where music has happened on the campus since 1968. Improvements to the monolithic, resonant, rough-textured, grey-concrete-but-not-unpleasantly-so tribute to 1960s modernism include an expanded stage, technical updates to the recording end, and several aesthetic adjustments.

Sunday afternoon saw a piano recital by UBC’s estimable pianist Jane Coop, who has been on the piano faculty for an amazing 30 years. She looks far younger than that would suggest, and her name has become familiar internationally.

Sitting in the plush new hall was a distinct pleasure—less red, for one thing, or whatever that old colour was—but it had a lot to do with Coop’s playing, of course. Just two composers were on her program, and they were an unlikely couple: Ludwig van Beethoven and Alexander Scriabin.

The latter’s Sonata No. 3 has a movement (double-dotted) that is one of the hardest in the book to play, but that Glenn Gould described as perhaps best enjoyed while reading Wuthering Heights. I quite agree and couldn’t see that Coop had the slightest difficulty with it. She also played the same composer’s very difficult Three Etudes, Op. 65 with style.

The Beethoven she chose was odd in that it never gets played: the 15 Variations and Fugue Op. 35, “Eroica”, and the Sonata Op. 14, No. 1. The sonata is a work that’s little more than amiable and no great shakes in view of his output. Maybe this is what made it seem like a good choice after all—Beethoven that for once is content to be just human. But there’s nothing secondary about the amazing 15 Variations, which Coop played wonderfully.

Anyway, the Roy Barnett Recital Hall. Nice to finally put a name to the place.