Music center hires noted consultant

An East Bay native who manages the nation's oldest summer music festival will help book the first artists to perform at Sonoma State University's Green Music Center.

The university has tapped Welz Kauffman, president and chief executive officer of the Ravinia Festival in suburban Chicago, as a consultant to program the performing arts center's inaugural season in 2008.

The 44-year-old Walnut Creek native, a former arts administrator with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic, brings a national reputation for innovation to the $63 million center, now under construction on Sonoma State's campus.

"Welz has become one of the most respected artistic administrators in the country, if not in the world," said Jeffrey Kahane, artistic director of the Green Music Festival, who's known Kauffman 20 years.

A private contributor on the center's advisory board earmarked a donation to pay Kauffman's fee, university officials said. They and Kauffman declined Tuesday to disclose the cost of his contract, which is being negotiated for one or two years.

Kauffman spoke enthusiastically of the Green Music Center's centerpiece, a 1,400-seat concert hall modeled on Tanglewood's Ozawa Hall in Lenox, Mass. The hall will open in the back to entertain larger audiences seated on an adjacent lawn.

"The uniqueness of the design of it, the intimacy of it, and ability to go larger in terms of audience, is ingenious," Kauffman said. "It's worked very well at Tanglewood and other places."

Just as Tanglewood has served as the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home, Ravinia hosts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at its 3,200-seat open-air pavilion. Built as an amusement park in 1904, Ravinia attracts some 600,000 people to its summer concerts, which range from classical and jazz to pop, blues and country.

For Eduardo Ochoa, SSU provost and vice president for academic affairs, Kauffman's business acumen is as important as his artistic credentials. Part of Kauffman's consulting role will be to help the SSU center set ticket prices, predict concert revenue, and identify ongoing fund-raising goals.