Located on the picturesque Sonoma State University campus in the heart of California’s Sonoma wine region, the Green Music Center in Rohnert Park will be inaugurated in the fall as the home to the University’s music department and focal point for music in the region. The $130 million complex, consisting of performance and rehearsal halls, a music education building with teaching studios and practice rooms, an executive retreat center and a destination restaurant, will soon welcome students and guests of all ages and backgrounds to hear, work alongside and learn from the very best.

In close collaboration with acoustician Lawrence Kirkegaard and theater consultant Leonard Auerbach, architect William Rawn modeled the 1,400-seat Joan and Sanford I. Weill Hall after Seiji Ozawa Hall at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. The south end of Weill Hall includes a retractable wall that can be opened onto a terraced lawn, thereby extending the reach of the concert hall to an additional 3,000 guests, and the Weill Commons, a meadow directly to the east of the concert hall, is being transformed into an amphitheater with a 10,000-seat capacity for large-scale outdoor events.

Concerts during the inaugural season will include appearances by the San Francisco Symphony, the Tallis Scholars and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Choir. The Sonoma Bach Choir, under the direction of Robert Worth, will join the Santa Rosa Symphony in a performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor (BWV 232).

In the following season, the installation of a tracker organ by John Brombaugh & Associates in the 250-seat Schroeder’s Recital Hall will mark the completion of the Green Music Center.