Lenox — Try to imagine Tanglewood without Ozawa Hall. You can’t. Now try to imagine Tanglewood without the Linde Center for Music and Learning. This you can do, but not for much longer: By summer’s end, most of us will have forgotten what Tanglewood’s storied Bernstein campus looked like “back in the day.” That’s because, already — even with the public ribbon-cutting still a week away — the new Linde Center structures seem to have been resting atop Highwood Ridge for unknown decades. The reason for this is simple: The buildings were designed by William Rawn Associates, the same folks who gave us Ozawa Hall almost 30 years ago. This Boston-based firm has a long history of creating stunning works of art that both delight the eye and serve myriad public functions.
The Linde Center’s ribbon-cutting will be held Friday, June 28, at 9 a.m. This moment will be rivaled in importance by only a few others in Tanglewood’s 80-year history — the opening of the Koussevitzky Music Shed in 1938, acquisition of the Highwood estate in 1986, and the opening of Seiji Ozawa Hall in 1994. For this reason, serious Tanglewood fans will be unwilling to miss it.
