Ire Led to Idealism for Pianist Mona Golabek

If you’re looking for pianist Mona Golabek these days, forget the usual concert halls. It’s not that the Los Angeles native has forsaken the standard musical venues. It’s certainly not that she takes her career one jot less seriously.

But when a special-interest agenda beckons, what’s a person to do? Particularly when that person responds to her powerful social conscience?

Golabek, who has played a number of times with the Los Angeles Philharmonic--notably a concerto written for her by William Kraft--will just as likely find her way to a women’s prison auditorium, where she once conducted a musical version of consciousness-raising. Yes, intriguing the inmates with Chopin, Gershwin and some extraordinary personal revelations.

It’s true that her series titled “The Outrageous Romantics”--opening tonight at UCLA in the Royce Hall 270 Lounge--has nothing to do with reform or rapprochement. And it’s worth noting that the location, a large chamber perfectly suited to the informal speaking that will accompany her music-making, is not a proscenium stage.

But what led the Avery Fisher Award-winning pianist to plunge into the lives of such composers as Brahms and Schumann was the very world-weariness she experienced while trying to “make connections with people”’ on the basis of her human concerns.

“I’d been so idealistic,” Golabek confesses, stopping in the middle of a litany of those travels to deliver this appraisal.

“But when the State Department sent me to Third World countries, the shock of the sorrow and suffering I saw was devastating. Near the Taj Mahal, in all its splendor, was a child who had been deliberately maimed by his parents so that he could qualify as a beggar.”

Herself the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Golabek is no stranger to human anguish. Indeed, she conveys an exquisite sensitivity to what others feel. That’s why she “was so hurt” by the reaction to her Middle Eastern tour a few years ago.

Because she dared to make appearances in Syria, Jordan and Kuwait, the pianist was branded a pariah in the Jerusalem Post.

“My message didn’t matter,” she recalls--”that we must not take sides, that we must reach out. Nor did it matter that I played a very moving piece dedicated to the tragedy of the Vietnam war (“In Memoriam” by William Bland). Nor did wearing my Jewish star help.

“By the time the press was finished exploiting all this in a big article titled ‘The Pianist and the Palestinians,’ my family in Los Angeles had been caused great pain. I couldn’t help feeling disillusioned. And that’s what led me back to another time, to people whose tremendous individuality and courage and passion embodied an ideal I can’t find today.”

That time, the era of the Romantics, produced the likes of Frederic Chopin and George Sand, Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult--”artists who struck in each other boundless inspiration . . . resulting in brilliant music,” she says.

“I guess it’s pure fantasy on my part,” Golabek says, “all this idealizing. But life really was different then. One can project what it was like, for instance, to anxiously wait two weeks for a letter that answers urgent emotional questions. We live with our MCI lines and Concorde planes. We resolve problems of the heart in two seconds, thanks to speed dialing.

“Instead, I want the audience to recall something of the past. I want them to escape to that rich silence and a dozen roses.”