Tribute to Slain Social Worker

Shortly after the February stabbing death of psychiatric social worker Robbyn Panitch at a Los Angeles County Mental Health Clinic in Santa Monica, pianist Mona Golabek wrote a letter to Panitch’s parents.

“If ever you want an evening of music to celebrate her life, I would be very happy to participate,” she offered.

That initial overture has resulted in a free memorial concert entitled “A Tribute to Robbyn Sue Panitch” to be performed at 8:30 p.m. Thursday in the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium.

Golabek, who never knew Panitch and says she had “no connection to her,” opened the newspaper, saw the photo and the headline about Panitch and was “just extraordinarily overcome.”

Golabek was struck by the idea that Panitch, 36, was a social worker allegedly killed by one of her clients. A transient, David Scott Smith, 26, is awaiting trial in her murder.

“She was among the rare few still existing today who hadn’t lost her idealism, her passion, her caring for others and was really doing it, really living it,” she explains.

Golabek, who says she is about the same age as Panitch, decided to give musical expression to the tragedy of Panitch’s death. She enlisted violinist Andres Cardenes and cellist Jeffrey Solow, musicians with whom she tours professionally. They will perform Arensky’s Trio in A minor, Opus 32, and Tchaikovsky’s Trio in A minor, Opus 50.

The program also features Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist Mitchell Newman, Panitch’s cousin. Newman will play “Blues,” the second movement of Ravel’s Violin Sonata.

“Robbyn loved jazz,” he says, “so this is fitting. It’s got a certain freedom to it, a certain pensive quality. It’s a good piece for her and for the program.”

The welcome will be delivered by Juvenile County Court Commissioner Michael Price, the Kaddish will be sung by Cantor Esther Garber Schwartz and the speaker will be Dr. Louis Jolyon West, head of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute.

In addition to the musical tribute, the concert’s significance for some is to rekindle community response to her slaying.

Says Nora Graham, a family friend and organizer of the Friends of Robbyn Panitch, an ad-hoc committee publicizing the memorial concert: “We wanted to help put her name and her tragedy before the public, because this could happen tomorrow in another clinic. Her parents are remarkably unvindictive and humanitarian in their concern for others who follow.”

Panitch’s parents, Gloria and Allan Panitch, say they have been touched by the “outpouring of concern from both friends and strangers with regard to the conditions of the death and the things leading up to it.” They believe that the concert will be “a fine opportunity to give something back to the community that had so strongly turned out for us and for Robbyn.”

Golabek, the winner of the People’s Prize at the 1970 International Chopin competition and the 1980 Avery Fisher Hall Recital Prize, is planning to close the Panitch memorial concert with the Tchaikovsky work. It is a eulogy written for the composer’s friend, Nicolai Rubinstein.

“If any piece of music is going to make this audience emotional or is going to extraordinarily open up their hearts,” Golabek says, “it would be the ending of the Tchaikovsky trio. There is nothing that can be played after that.”

The Panitch family has requested that the concert not take on a funereal tone, but Golabek notes: “We can’t forget that this is a very tragic thing that happened, a tragic loss. The music is an amazing statement, that ending, to the loss. It really is a cry, a universal cry.”