Green Music Center's musical debut

The $110 million Green Music Center, under construction at Sonoma State University, is beginning its long-awaited debut.

Wider than a bass drum, louder than a trumpet and taller than a string bass, the finely calibrated instrument will seat 1,400 inside and another 10,000 outside, past its retractable back door.

Although the future home of the Santa Rosa Symphony is still missing chairs and the opening date is still a long ways off, the interior of the hall is complete, from the fir floor and beechwood railings to the stage lined with maple and acoustic panels.

This week, the Santa Rosa Symphony is taking some 700 subscribers on sneak-preview tours.

“It is clearly ready to be seen and heard,” said Alan Silow, executive director of the Santa Rosa Symphony. “The tours are a way of saying thank you to our subscribers.”

The symphony will give a total of 13 walking tours over the course of three days, ending Saturday afternoon. Subscribers can wander through the 14,000 square-foot building, including the two balconies, to get a feel for where they might like to sit someday.

Meanwhile, Santa Rosa Symphony Music Director Bruno Ferrandis and a trio of symphony musicians took the hall for a test drive last week, in anticipation of the subscriber tours.

Principal clarinetist Roy Zajak, violinist Kathy Marshall and cellist Laura McLellan marveled at the acoustics after performing a few movements from Mozart’s Divertimento No. 1 in B flat major and Haydn’s London Trio No. 1.

Both the musicians and Ferrandis agreed that the hall’s acoustics delivered surgical precision while opening up their dynamics and timbre to a full range of colors.

“You see the sound with a magnifier,” Ferrandis said. “I have been roaming all over the hall, and you get the same good sound. The attacks are phenomenal.”

McLellan, who played for 27 years with the Cincinnati Symphony, enjoyed being able to hear her own playing as well as her colleague’s.

“Blending is so easy, and the dynamic range is effortless,” she said. “The hall really helps you.”

The acoustics of the hall reminded Marshall of what it’s like to play a Stradivarius violin.

“All of a sudden, all these colors are there,” she said. “The instrument teaches you how to finesse and get what you want.”

Most importantly, Zajac said the hall provides musicians with immediate feedback, so that they can trust what they’re hearing.

“It’s really a stunning place to play,” he said. “I really think the hall speaks for itself ... This is going to be a major turning point for our symphony.”

Frank Baroni, superintendent for general contractor Rudolph and Sletten of Redwood City, could not suppress a smile while listening to the trio perform. After two and a half years of construction work, he was hearing music in the hall for the first time.

“I love it,” he said. “It’s fantastic ... It turned out beautifully.”

The construction company has been working with design architect William Rawn Associates of Boston and acoustic consultant R. Lawrence Kirkegaard & Associates of Chicago on the project, Baroni said.

The hall is designed in a classic “shoebox” shape, similar to the Musikverein in Vienna and Boston Symphony Hall in Boston. It is modeled most closely after Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., with a large door at the rear opening out to lawn seating.

One of the key aspects of the acoustical design are the variable acoustic banners that line the sides of the hall along the ceiling. The adjustable banners can be fine tuned for specific kinds of music.

“For Stravinsky, I may want a dry sound,” Ferrandis said. “For opera, it’s a more resonant sound ... there’s a great deal of flexibility.”

Yet to be completed are the hall’s lobby and the backstage area, including bathrooms, instrument storage rooms, soloist and conductor’s rooms.

The concert hall is also missing an audio-visual system and chairs, but the university expects to receive $2.5 million in bond money to fund the chairs.

“We are on the list to receive money for the concert hall chairs,” said Susan Kashack, communications director at SSU. “We’ve been told that we will get that money, probably in June.”

Once the chairs go to bid in July, it will take 18 months to order and install them.

The construction contract for the complex currently runs through October, but it may be extended, Kashack said.

“As money continues to come in, we’ll keep the construction company rolling,” she said. “Once they leave and have to return, things have to be rebid.”

SSU was hoping to get stimulus money from the state or the federal government to help complete the project, she added. Neither has come through so far.

The Green Music Center is named after telecommunications pioneer Don Green and his wife, Maureen, who got the project rolling with a $10 million donation in 1997. The music center is being built by Sonoma State University in partnership with the Santa Rosa Symphony.

The complex consists of a music education building, which opened last fall; a hospitality center, which will open in about a month; and the 4,500-square-foot Schroeder recital hall, which still requires $6 million to complete.

Ground-breaking on the music complex took place in the fall of 2000. Since then, fund-raising efforts have struggled to keep up with the project’s rising costs. So far, about $45 million has been donated by private individuals and $47 million raised from state funds and bonds. The current fund-raising goal is $16.9 million.

“People are just a little reluctant right now to make commitments,” Kashack said. “They are very interested in the project, but they want to wait and see what the economy looks like.”

Last month, the Koret Foundation of San Franscisco donated $500,000 toward construction on the concert hall. An opening date has not yet been set.

“People ask when it’s going to open,” Silow said. “I say, ‘It’s going to open in about $17 million dollars.’”