Calling the tune: Philanthropist Don Green has contributed his name and money to a proposed state-of-the-art concert hall at SSU that critics say is too ambitious.

“AIM HIGH & Reach Wide” commands the slogan scrawled across the promotional materials for the much-anticipated Donald and Maureen Green Music Center, an acoustically advanced music facility planned for the Sonoma State University campus and slated to house the Santa Rosa Symphony.

But it now seems that the project’s promoters may have aimed too high and reached too wide. As cost estimates rise and the economy plummets, criticism of the ambitious facility is increasing.

New calculations put the cost of building the Green Music Center, which is modeled on the famous Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, at $48 million rather than the earlier estimate of approximately $40 million. The latest news is that the opening of the facility will be delayed at least another year, until 2004.

A groundbreaking ceremony for the center took place last October in an atmosphere of great optimism. But the concert hall site, a 53-acre field at the intersection of Rohnert Park Expressway and Petaluma Hill Road, still remains empty apart from a “Future Home of” sign.

“We can’t start work on the actual building until all the funds are committed,” says Jim Meyer, Sonoma State University’s vice president of development. “We still need another $19 million to begin construction.”

The ambitious plans call for a high-tech main concert hall that seats 1,400 (with additional lawn seating for 7,000), a 300-seat recital hall, numerous lobbies, practice rooms, offices, a music library, concession areas, and perhaps even a full restaurant.

After factoring in contractor and engineering costs, Meyer says, the price of building the center has actually increased by $12 million from the architect’s original estimate.

Center boosters have approximately $27 million committed to the project by donors, but they are scrambling to find the money needed to complete the project as the once red-hot telecom industry-fueled economy continues to slide.

“While the cost [of building the center] went up, the economy went in the other direction,” Meyer laments. “It’s difficult for people to give. A lot of our gifts were stock gifts, and stock is down from a year or two ago. The economy is not as bright or encouraging as it was.”

The initial $10 million seed money for the project was donated by Telecom Valley tycoon and philanthropist Don Green and his wife, Maureen–hence the acoustically advanced facility’s name.

Ever since that donation, both SSU and the Santa Rosa Symphony have been involved in energetically raising funds. In more prosperous times, the campaign included trips to Tanglewood for Sonoma County arts patrons and receptions held at homes around the North Bay for potential donors. Many of those who have kicked down money so far have been involved in the telecom and wine industries. But those donations came before the economic slowdown.

Meyer says that Santa Rosa Symphony conductor Jeffrey Kahane and its conductor laureate Corrick Brown will soon kick off a new fundraising “Conduct-or’s Campaign” and are looking for donors for a challenge gift scenario.

“[The economic climate] has made us look at the possibility of phasing the building in two pieces,” Meyer says. He adds that construction on a 1,100-car parking lot, roads, and a bridge way (funded by parking bond monies) will begin in a month or so. Even so, the music hall won’t be opening its doors any time soon.

“We’re now looking at 2004,” says Meyer. “There’s a two-year construction period.”

Meanwhile, the Festival on the Green, three outdoor summer music events on campus featuring the Santa Rosa Symphony and jazz, is offering trial runs aimed at building an audience and laying the groundwork for a major summer festival when the music center opens. While the July 4 concert attracted 3,500 people, not everyone is caught up in the festival frenzy.

“The festival is held on the commencement lawn near lots of buildings, and it’s all very pretty with lots of activity, and it generates the impression that this [center] is going places, but I don’t know for how long,” says Rick Luttmann, an SSU professor of mathematics since 1970 and chair of faculty for the upcoming academic year. “The longer [the project] gets postponed, the more skeptical the community is going to be on whether it will happen.”

And Luttmann adds he has even more reason for concern if the center comes to fruition. “I’m a music lover and I’d like to see this happen, but my concern is we may not be able to afford it and we may do serious and irreparable harm to the rest of the university,” he explains.

Luttman adds that he speaks for many members of the faculty who have also voiced concerns about the Green Music Center’s operating expenses to administrators.

“The goal is for the hall to eventually be self-supporting, but from estimates I’ve heard, it may take 10 years to get to that point,” Luttmann says. “The staffing and other costs to run the center have to be met by our current budget. And we already have problems making ends meet.”

When asked about opposition to the center, Meyer says the main concerns he’s heard are from individuals worried about additional traffic flow in Cotati.

Even with a tough fundraising time ahead, Meyer says the project won’t be downsized or downgraded in any way.

“A music hall without perfect acoustics is a waste of money,” he scoffs. “It costs more to do things first class, and this is a first-class hall. We’re going first class, and yes, it may take a bit longer. But Sonoma County has survived without this for many years, and a year more won’t make a difference.”

Festival on the Green presents a pair of concerts. On Saturday, Aug. 11, the Santa Rosa Symphony presents violinist Nurit Pacht in a special program of Tchaikovsky, at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $28 for adults, $7 for youths. SSU campus, 1801 E. Cotati Blvd., Rohnert Park. On Sunday, Aug. 12, at 5 p.m. (gates open at 3 p.m.), the Joe Lovano Nonet performs selections from ’52nd Street Themes.’ Tickets are $22-$35 (free for youths). 707/546-8742.

From the August 9-15, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Triple Time

Petaluma Summer Music Festival ups the tempo

“EVOLUTION is such an imperceptible thing,” says Elly Lichenstein enthusiastically. “Things evolve so naturally, you don’t even notice it’s happening until you stop and look back at where you started.

“Then you think, ‘When did this happen? How in the world have we come so far?’ ”

Sitting at a patio table in the cozy courtyard of the Cinnabar Theater, Lichenstein is talking this morning about the Petaluma Summer Music Festival, a three-week-long annual event that has been evolving for 14 unpredictable years.

Cinnabar Theater, where Lichenstein serves as both artistic and executive director, is the sponsor of the ever-evolving festival. What started as a cheeky plot to slip classical music under the unsuspecting noses of folks who’d never paid it much attention has now become a world-class endeavor.

This expectation-challenging collage of interwoven musical events, performances, operas, and recitals now boasts a small army of visiting musicians from around the globe and our own backyard.

The first Petaluma Music Festival was launched with the best of intentions, recalls Lichenstein, a longtime member of Cinnabar who took the reins at the theater in 1999 when founder Marvin Klebe passed away.

“Our goal was to open people’s minds to our kind of music,” Lichenstein says with a mock-painful grimace. “By which I mean classical, opera, world music. So we brought classical musicians into Petaluma’s bars and drinking spots, hoping to hit a brand-new audience unawares.

“It was a noble failure,” she admits, laughing.

Though the barroom concerts were unceremoniously dropped from the schedule, every festival since has maintained the missionary fervor of that initial impulse. By using various performance venues around the city, the festival continued to pursue its goal of bringing music to unusual places. The Music in the Mansions series, in which local homeowners allowed their houses to be used for recitals, was the evolutionary offspring of the Concerts in the Bars idea.

The evolution continues.

This year’s festival, running Aug. 4-25, is significantly different from festivals past. For the first time ever, all events will take place at Cinnabar’s headquarters, the renovated schoolhouse that has been the theatrical company’s home base since 1974. While some may mourn the end of the multiple-venue approach, Lichenstein says the move was necessary.

“The Music in the Mansions was very well loved,” she says, “but over the years, fewer and fewer people were willing to open up their houses to us, and festival-goers made it clear that they no longer wanted to attend concerts in the same few mansions, year after year.”

Lichenstein affirms that future audiences will likely see a return to the mansions–or some new version of it.

For now, though, she’s confident that bringing the festival home to Cinnabar is the best move.

“From a musical point of view,” she says, “most of those venues weren’t acoustically to our advantage. We’re working on plans to create new venues in the future, but for now, music sounds best in our space.”

A PEEK at the list of the acts lined up to perform in that space–a charming old place that has evolved quite a bit itself, architecturally speaking, over the last 27 years–reveals a singularly ambitious summer season.

Opera is well represented, starting on Sunday, Aug. 5, with Seymour Barab’s lively children’s opera Chanticleer, based on Chaucer’s tales of the famous rooster and his troubles with foxes.

The festival’s highlight, which Lichenstein rises from her seat to animatedly describe, is a pairing of two operas by Igor Stravinsky: Mavra–which Lichenstein calls “a satiric curtain-raiser”–and The Nightingale, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fable.

“It’s Stravinsky at his lushest,” Lichenstein says. “And this production takes song and dance to a level not before seen here.”

The Nightingale, she adds, speaks to what she regards as a serious social problem.

“Technology is expanding so rapidly, so seductively, that we are losing our connection to what is real,” Lichenstein says. “Like the emperor who could choose to listen to the music of this gorgeous nightingale, but opts for the synthetic music of a mechanical bird, we are losing something vital and beautiful and necessary.”

The two Stravinsky operas are performed together and can be seen on three consecutive Fridays and Saturdays: Aug. 10 and 11, 17 and 18, and 24 and 25.

The rest of the festival is populated by artists representing musical styles from around the planet and across the ages: local soprano Eileen Morris (Aug. 7), classical pianist Christopher Weldon (Aug. 14), Baroque ensemble the Jefferson Chamber Players (Aug. 21), Celtic duo the Men of Worth (Aug. 22), East-West music-dance group MusicAeterna (Aug. 9), cellist Jill Rachny Brindel and pianist Marilyn Thompson (Aug. 16), Second Avenue Klezmer Ensemble (Aug. 12), and a repeat performance by last year’s thunderously well-received Melody of China ensemble (Aug. 8).

Lichenstein glows with excitement as she describes each performer, taking special delight in admitting that last year’s appearance by Melody of China exploded her expectations of what Chinese music could sound like.

“This music,” she says, “is so lush and enchanting, I’ll never think of China’s music in the same limited way again. Which, of course, is what the Summer Music Festival is all about to begin with.”

Lichenstein is similarly elated about bringing jazz singer Shane Kelly to the Cinnabar stage on the festival’s opening night. A recent transplant to Sonoma County from Atlanta, Ga., Kelly has been a vital part of the Chicago and Atlanta cabaret scenes. Since moving to California, she has been making a name for herself in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

“She breezed in here one day and blew us away,” Lichenstein recalls. “Before we heard a second of her music we were already in love, thinking, ‘Who is this amazing human being, with this rich head of long red hair and sparkling blue eyes, and this smile from here to Poughkeepsie, New York?'”

Kelly’s music is laid-back jazz blues, with a taste of gospel and a dash of Southern spice that will be appropriately highlighted on opening night by a Southern-style summer dinner inspired by Kelly’s own Southern family recipes.

“I can’t wait [for the concert],” Kelly says, pointing out that a percentage of her CD sales that evening will go to providing scholarships for Cinnabar’s successful youth arts programs.

Asked to describe her music, Kelly laughs.

“Honey, I guess you’d have to call me a traditional jazz singer,” she says, “but with a certain showy flavor all my own. I like really getting inside the lyric of a song, interpreting it as if it was its own story–which, of course, every song is.”

The Petaluma Summer Music Festival runs Aug. 4-25 at the Cinnabar Theater, 3333 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. Times and ticket prices vary. For details, call 707/763-8920.

From the August 2-8, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.