On an evening this past June, the Royal Ontario Museum was determined to cele­brate the completion of the Daniel Libeskind–designed Crystal. And so a year after the museum’s new addition first opened, empty and unfinished, the ROM decided to throw a $200-a-head event called “The Night of the Avant Garde” in the Crystal’s soaring, geometrical lobby. The avant-garde has become a touchstone for William Thorsell lately. The ROM’s visionary director makes a point of explaining that the public rarely understands true genius at first—genius, it goes without saying, like Libeskind’s much-derided Crystal.

The evening’s organizers did what they could. They brought in a troupe of models to parade through the audience in ankle boots and clothes by the local designer Ula Zukowska. A psychedelic pattern was projected onto one of the lobby’s vast white drywall plains in a loop. And the gala’s roving wait staff wore rectangular slashes of metallic eye makeup—a nod, perhaps, to Daryl Hannah’s humanoid character in Blade Runner.

The highlight of the evening was the performance of “Music Space Reflection,” a 26-minute composition that the British composer Simon Bainbridge wrote in honour of Libeskind’s brilliance. The way Bainbridge, who was there to conduct the piece, has described it, the work translates the architect’s spaces sonically, “into a continuous unfolding of musical fragments, punctuated by silence, that extend in duration from one second to 34 seconds using the Fibonacci sequence—1:2:3:5:8:13:21:34.” Or as Libeskind, who was also there, put it in his own inimitable way, “I think it’s incredible because music is invisible, but sound is positive.” The piece had already been performed at Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum North, in Manchester, in 2007, and it had since played in London as well. The ROM party marked its North American debut.

Thorsell tried to hush the crowd. “You’re welcome to wander around the space as it goes on,” he announced above the din. He had personally underwritten part of the commission of Bainbridge’s work. With his high forehead and graying, close-cut hair, Thorsell is a good-looking man, fastidiously well pressed and put together. He turned 63 this summer, but he likes dark suits cut slim and clean like a younger man would wear.