O.C. MUSIC : Violinist Holds Hope for Romania Despite His Own Bad Times There

Violinist Sergiu Schwartz remembers the Romanian secret police--the Securitate--imprisoning his father for two years on a charge that was never made clear. . . .

Mozart Camerata founding music director Ami Porat remembers the Securitate offering his father a choice between life imprisonment or serving as a spy for the Romanian state. . . .

But such memories come reluctantly--neither musician likes to talk about his childhood in Romania.

“I don’t like to publicize these things too much,” Schwartz said. “It is so private, and it is absurd for anyone living in the West to think about such abuses.

“But since everyone now has heard about this Romanian revolution, how bloody it was, how people could no longer stand it, the awareness of the American people and the Free World has gotten to the point where there is some interest and understanding.”

Porat said simply: “I have very few memories, and it is quite obvious that my mind is filtering them.” (See related story on F3.)

The two musicians will be heard together in concert Saturday at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach.

Born in Bucharest in 1957, Schwartz showed an early interest in music.

“I must have driven my parents crazy with my noises,” Schwartz said in a recent phone interview from a friend’s home in Beverly Hills. “I would pick anything that would make a sound and play it.

“Father gave me a toy violin when I was 5 or 6, thinking (my interest in it) was one of those things that comes and goes. I got angry and immediately smashed it and asked them to give me a real one.”

Schwartz’s parents were quite poor and could scarcely afford to buy a violin. Still, his father brought in a teacher to test him.

“After he had played a little for me, I wanted to do the same thing. I imitated him, like a monkey does. He whispered to my father--I found out many years later--, ‘If you don’t buy it, I will give it to you, because it would be a crime not to let him study.’ ”

But this seemingly idyllic world soon began to collapse.

“The whole environment is difficult for a child to notice,” he said. “If you are born in a prison and you don’t see the light outside, you cannot compare it to a better life. . . . You simply don’t know what you’re missing.

“And obviously, under the Communist regime, people had to suffer a lot, and being a Jewish minority, this added more suffering and persecution.

“It didn’t take me too many years to find out I was rejected by that society because (of my) ethnic background.

“I taught myself three languages--English, French and German--to read the books and the magazines that were coming from the outside. Soon I realized the possibilities are tremendous. . . . My mind was set on getting out of Romania.”

The family tried for many years to leave the country, an effort that drew the attention of the authorities. About this time, Schwartz’s father was imprisoned for two years.

“We still don’t know why,”Schwartz said. “At that time, people would say something, and they would be imprisoned. He was labeled a ‘revisionist.’ I don’t know what that is.”

He recalled that when the police came, “they took (virtually) everything.”

“They left us with a bed, a table and some chairs,” he said. “There were two more things they wanted to take away--one was my violin and the other was a little bicycle I was riding.

“I remember that our Romanian Christian neighbors abhored the way they behaved and begged the officers, ‘Take anything you want but leave the violin and the bicycle.’ They left them. I’m very grateful to such people. . . . “

Schwartz’s father was held incommunicado for a week. “We didn’t know if he was alive or where he was.”

The next two years were terrible for him and his mother.

“We didn’t have much to eat,” Schwartz remembered.

After his father was released, his mother became ill with cancer and died a few years later. In 1973, Schwartz and his father at last were allowed to emigrate.

He says that their freedom “was bought.”

“I found out much later that for every Jew who got out of Romania, there was price on this, from $2,000 to more than $10,000. Everyone paid to get out of Romania. . . . Part of this price was all our savings. We were left with not one cent.”

Despite the upheavals in making a transition from one kind of society to another, Schwartz described his arrival in Israel as “my second chance in life.

“I wouldn’t describe it in any other way,” he said. “When I got there, my dreams were fulfilled.”

He received music training in Israel and went on to study in Germany and at the Juilliard School of Music in New York under the sponsorship of Isaac Stern’s Israel-American Cultural Foundation. He has won several international competitions and made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1982.

Today, at 33, though he is a citizen of Israel (which means he can be summoned back into the army in case of a national emergency), he also maintains a residence in New York, where his management is based.

In January, he gave a recital in London, “a few days after they executed the dictator (Nicolae Ceausescu).

“We donated all the proceeds to a newly formed committee for the (Romanian) people who had suffered and who needed immediate help. I was very glad to do it. All the ex-Romanian artists in Europe are doing the same. . . .

“I don’t have many good things to say about the state where I was born. I only would add, I don’t have resentments. I don’t take it personally. There were many other people suffering, and everyone was suffering in silence. . . .

“(But) I would like very much to go back and remind the people there that we haven’t forgotten them, that they have a better future and that things will get better.

“Obviously, they are still suffering the consequences of the upheaval. It is not easy for them to (transform) a totalitarian system to a democratic one. They’ve never known the meaning of freedom. It will take time.”

Sergiu Schwartz will be soloist with music director Ami Porat and the Mozart Camerata in Bruch’s First Violin Concerto at 8 p.m. on Saturday at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 600 St. Andrews Road, in Newport Beach. Tickets: $18. Information: (714) 634-8276.