Sweet music fills the air at concert hall's gala debut

$5.5-M Buhler Hall is pride of Gretna

Winnipeg Free Press
Mon Nov 29 2004
By Morley Walker

Wooed by a choir performance, John Buhler (middle) donated $500,000 toward the building of Buhler Hall in Gretna.

GRETNA -- You could almost hear a heart beat between musical numbers yesterday during the gala opening concert of the new Buhler Hall in Gretna. 

But when the voices rang out from the stage, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra performed a spirited Dvorak symphony, the music flooded the sold-out room with the warmth and sweetness of honey. 

"Winnipeg has nothing like it," said Henry Engbrecht, the University of Manitoba choral professor and director of the vocal ensemble Canzona, which entertained the rapt crowd yesterday. 

"Choirs from all over are going to make pilgrimages to this place." 

Pretty much the entire population of this southern Manitoba farming community put on their best church outfits and attended one of the two performances in the $5.5-million facility, which has been added to the Mennonite Collegiate Institute, a private parochial school with a mere 170 students. 

"It's amazing," Paul Inksetter, executive director of the WSO, virtually all of whose 67 members made the 120-kilometre trip by bus to headline both the afternoon and evening's repeat concerts. 

"To think that a school and a community this size could build something like this." 

Yesterday's event attracted a who's who of the southern Manitoba political and business elite, including Emerson MLA Jack Penner, Portage-Lisgar MP Brian Pallister, Friesens Corporation head honcho David Friesen and Golden West Radio owner Elmer Hildebrand. 

Also present were Winnipeg businessman and philanthropist John Buhler and his wife, Bonnie, whose $500,000 donation bought naming rights to the 500-seat hall. Two of the Buhlers' granddaughters attend MCI, founded in 1889. 

At a ceremony prior to the afternoon concert, Buhler recalled how MCI principal Paul Kroeker wooed his donation with a private performance of the school's choir, bringing tears to his eyes. 

"Any school that can produce music like that deserves somebody's help," Buhler said. "The rest is history." 

Bert Friesen, a Winnipeg board member of the Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society, says the hall could easily play host to recording projects by the CBC, the WSO and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra.

Gretna, in the southeast corner of a "Mennonite rectangle" with a total population of 50,000, has no large employer other than MCI. The town likes to advertise its population as 500, but Hildebrand believes it's closer to 300. 

"I think the chamber of commerce likes to exaggerate," he joked. 

The tear-drop-shaped hall was designed by Winnipeg architect Raymond Wan, 44, whose parents sent him to MCI from China in 1975.