Thursday, May 7, 2026 at Noon
Santa Rosa Country Club

with Francesco Lecce-Chong
Conductor, Santa Rosa Symphony
& Chloe Tula, 
Harpist & Wine Sommelier

Their sponsor is Michele Chaboudy,
WACSC President

About the Program         

          Can great music rise to the level of international healing? Can a joyous wine culture bring balm and understanding across borders? On May 7^th we’ll welcome back Santa Rosa Symphony Musical Director Francesco Lecce-Chong – you may remember his outstanding program last year on Music as Diplomacy! Joining him this time will be his wife, Chloe Tula, harpist and wine sommelier par excellence. Their current program, Music and Wine: Reaching Across Borders in a Fractured World, will raise the curtain on how their areas of expertise bridge national and cultural divides at a time when nothing is more sorely needed.

          Francesco and Chloe will regale us with the history of music and wine as vehicles for human-to-human contact and cultural exchange. Then they’ll treat us to their unique perspectives on the current challenging world environment, including how increased tariffs and cuts to government arts funding cast long shadows.

          Countering pervasive negative news, and with insights from their work-related travels to the UK, France, Austria, Czechia, and Romania, Francesco and Chloe will unpack how innovations in the music and wine industries give us reasons to hope.  

          This promises to be a very special program we’ll all be talking about for a long time!

          Chloe Tula is a Sonoma County sommelier and harpist. Born and raised in Wisconsin, she earned her degree in harp performance from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. She then won a prestigious harp fellowship from the New World Symphony in Miami Beach to study and perform for the next three years under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. This led to appearances with major orchestras across the country.

          After a trip to France in 2023, Chloe was looking for new challenges, so she enrolled in the Wine & Spirits Education Trust courses and dove into her formal wine studies. She was invited to join the sommelier team at Little Saint in Healdsburg and later became Wine Director at The Sea Ranch Lodge where she earned the program its first Wine Spectator Award of Excellence. Presently, Chloe is a sommelier at Enclos in Sonoma, a two-Michelin star restaurant focused on California cuisine.

          A San Francisco native, Francesco Lecce-Chong studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Mannes College of Music in New York, and Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Italy. Trained as a pianist and composer as well as conductor, he was Associate Conductor of the Pittsburgh and Milwaukee Symphonies before being named Conductor and Music Director of the Santa Rosa Symphony seven years ago. His musicality and dynamism with the baton have delighted Green Center audiences.

          Francesco regularly appears with major orchestras from the San Francisco Symphony to the New York Philharmonic, collaborating with top soloists such as Renée Fleming and Itzhak Perlman. His debut with the San Francisco Symphony was described by The San Francisco Chronicle as “first rate,” noting the “vitality and brilliance of the music-making he drew from members of the San Francisco Symphony.”

          Here in Santa Rosa, Francesco has taken our symphony to increasingly new heights.

Register HERE!