Charles Rus can’t wait to play Schroeder Hall

Nationally known organist Charles Rus looks forward to playing the 1,248-pipe Schroeder Hall organ in a sold-out concert Nov. 30 at Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center -- and with good reason.

Rus was one of the expert advisers who chose this particular organ for its present site at the new $9.5 million, 250-seat hall on the Rohnert Park campus.

“I was employed by the university probably 14 years ago to begin looking for an organ. We traveled all over the country. About seven years ago, we went to see this organ, and decided that very day to purchase it,” he said. “It was already a famous instrument. It just sounded fantastic.”

Rus has played the rare instrument before, but not in Schroeder Hall, which was designed specifically to make a perfect home for this pipe organ.

“I haven’t been in Schroeder Hall since it’s been finished. I was there during construction and walked on the mud floors and saw the hole above the stage for the organ loft,” said Rus, who is now director of music at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Medina, Wash. The hall opened in August.

The Schroeder Hall organ was built in 1972 by John Brombaugh, an engineer and acoustician credited with bringing back baroque-style organs. The instrument, formally known as Brombaugh Opus 9, is one of just 66 organs built by the master, which are now scattered across 23 states. The Schroeder Hall organ is the ninth one he built.

Originally created for a church in Toledo, Ohio, which later closed, the organ was discovered and reserved by the Green Music Center team, and kept at a church in Rochester, New York, until Schroeder Hall was completed.

“I went to Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Toledo, and played the organ in its first home there,” Rus said. “When I was in Rochester, I graduated from the Eastman School of Music, where the organ spent many years at many churches, and I heard it and played it then.”

Original plans called for a pipe organ in the main, 1,400-seat Weill Hall at Green Music Center, Rus said.

“We were thinking of putting a much larger organ in the main hall, then one thing led to another, and the main hall was not going to have the kind of acoustics that an organ needs to have, which is different from what an orchestra or a pianist would want to have,” he explained. “So we ended up building the small hall for choral music and organ music, especially.”

The Schroeder Hall pipe organ is not the massive sort of instrument associated with huge cathedrals.

“It’s a relatively small organ, as organs go, but it doesn’t sound like a small organ,” Rus said. “It’s a pretty versatile machine.”

The organist’s 3 p.m. performance is part of Green Music Center’s new “Sundays at Schroeder” concert series. The hall’s organ is expected to draw other top organists to perform there in the future.

“I’m going to play mostly German baroque and Bach music,” Rus explained. “That is what this organ does best.”

Information: gmc.sonoma.edu, 866-955-6040.

You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. Read his Arts blog at arts.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.