Students Reach for High Note

Nonchalance is not an option when making your Carnegie Hall debut. Just ask 15-year-old Sarah Crespo-Szabo.

“I’m so nervous my hands are shaking,” the percussionist confides to a cellist moments before the Santa Monica High School Symphony walks onstage.

Crespo-Szabo and her 78 orchestra mates had spent months preparing for this moment, and, typical teenagers, many wanted to seem blase. But now, as they are about to play music by Tchaikovsky in the hall where he had conducted 111 years earlier, palms grow clammy, mouths go dry, bellies churn.

As the musicians troop out to the stage’s glare, the first-chair trumpet, who had been sick in bed during that morning’s Carnegie run-through, gets his first peek at the towering tiers of loges and the creamy, gold-bedecked walls. Wide-eyed, he utters, “Whoa!”

Somewhere between “Mr. Holland’s Opus” and “Music of the Heart” lies the tale of how the Santa Monica High School Symphony played Carnegie Hall.

This is not, like that first Hollywood weeper, a story about a music teacher postponing the opus of a lifetime to devote himself to his students. Nor is it, like the other, a saga of underprivileged youngsters defying the odds to land on the music world’s quintessential stage.

But two elements of those films run like leitmotifs through this account: the ability of a committed mentor to push kids to new heights, and the power of a caring community to provide the lift.

And then, of course, there was the force of the music itself.

After the musicians take their seats, the blond concertmaster--looking like the West Coast surfer he is--steps onto the podium and cues the principal oboist for an “A.” He matches that “A” with his violin and the strings and winds join in, the rich sound swelling.

Conductor Christopher Schwabe strides onstage and, beaming, acknowledges the audience’s applause. He turns to face his charges, appearing older than their years in their black-and-white concert wear.

As Crespo-Szabo steadies her sticks above the snare drum, Schwabe raises his baton but hesitates. He knows that the first note will set the tone. Are they ready?

A Confidence That Knows No Bounds

The joke is as corny as they come. But that doesn’t keep Schwabe from repeating it over seven months of rehearsals.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” he taunts his students. “Practice, practice, practice.”

That they do not groan at this chestnut is but one indication of their youth--as if another is needed amid this sea of bare midriffs and toe rings (on the girls), moussed hair (on the boys) and precariously low-slung pants (on both).

“Can we start together, please?” Schwabe asks in frustration after a mushy launch of the fourth movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. It is January, and the Carnegie trip a mere 2 1/2 months away. For 55 minutes, Schwabe scolds and praises. “Much more speed of bow,” he orders the violins. “Very nice,” he tells the timpanist.

He reserves his favorite compliment--”That really sparkled!”--for when things go just so. Privately, his confidence in them knows no bounds. He is 61 and gray-haired but has abundant energy and no plans to retire. What no one realizes, including Schwabe, is that the school district will reach a financial crisis before the year ends.

Since September, they have rehearsed the second and fourth movements from the Tchaikovsky symphony. In November, they took on Leonard Bernstein’s giddy “Candide” Overture.

Schwabe chose the pieces after considering the ensemble’s strengths (violins and horns) and weaknesses (inexperienced percussion and too few violas).

He also gave a nod to Carnegie’s vivid past. Tchaikovsky conducted there opening night, May 5, 1891. And composer-conductor Bernstein’s personal history was famously intertwined with the hall after his last-minute substitution for the ailing Bruno Walter at a nationally broadcast 1943 concert with the New York Philharmonic.

Schwabe’s musical picks would challenge many college orchestras, and they are as the composers wrote them; no watered-down arrangements for this bunch.

As dozens of trophies attest, this is one of the finest high school ensembles in California. The orchestra will perform, along with two youth orchestras, at the invitation of MidAmerica Productions, an independent producer that arranges such concerts. Thanks to its reputation, the orchestra didn’t have to submit an audition tape.

And yet, in the final movement of the Fifth, starting with measure 414, it struggles. The passage proves persistently troubling, with its gorgeous melody but thorny, chromatic progression through sharps, flats and naturals that don’t appear in the key signature.

They play it again and again and again.

Nearly three-quarters of the orchestra musicians are juniors or seniors, several of whom have been accepted to prestigious university music programs, including Oberlin College, Vanderbilt University and Indiana University, Schwabe’s alma mater. Most have taken private lessons for years. Several have parents who are or have been professional musicians.

The orchestra’s mundane surroundings at Samohi--as the school is known--belie the event ahead. Samohi’s auditorium, Barnum Hall, has been under renovation for five years. The adjacent music building has been out of commission all this year. The orchestra practices in the cafeteria, separated from the lunch crowd by bare drywall.

Their mission, under Schwabe, is to make music. Not just play the notes--anyone can play accurately, as Oscar Wilde once observed--but to give the notes life.

For months, Schwabe parses the Tchaikovsky measure by painstaking measure. It is emotional music, filled by turns with heart-wrenching yearning and swashbuckling bombast. What do 16- and 17-year-olds, who are constantly reminded to spit out their gum and to stop their chit-chat, know of such suffering, such passion?

It’s so timid, he tells the musicians. It’s got to be twice that loud. Everybody still needs to be more aggressive, more confident, more powerful. Horns, it’s very nice, but it sounds tight and tense. We can improve, but we’re not there yet. Keep working on that so you don’t feel frantic. There’s no faking it. You can’t hide on the stage of Carnegie Hall.

A Nerve-Racking Solo at Carnegie

Now at Carnegie, Crespo-Szabo, the anxious percussionist, awaits Schwabe’s downbeat, and the hours of rehearsal guide her like a strong hand at her back.

As Schwabe snaps his arm, the jitters ease from her fingers and she flawlessly rat-a-tats Bernstein’s syncopated snare drum part. Two of her fellow percussionists--fill-ins recruited from the back of the violin section--resoundingly pound the bass drum and crash the cymbals, right on cue. The piece flies to its witty conclusion and the audience of 1,800 erupts in applause.

After these five allegro molto con brio minutes, still about a minute more than a professional orchestra would take, Crespo-Szabo can relax. She has no part in the Tchaikovsky.

Senior Catherine Bennion now feels the heat. As principal horn player, she has the most nerve-racking solo at Carnegie--the melancholy opening of the slow Tchaikovsky second movement, one of the most famous horn passages ever written.

All ears will be on her.

Students Display a Love for Classical Music

Bennion decided she was serious about music at the end of her junior year.

Homework used to come before practicing on her Holton H179 Farkas model horn; now it comes “if and when I feel like it.” On top of playing in marching band, symphony and every pit orchestra she can manage, she is president of the youth group at her church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and conducts hymns each Sunday.

When she can, she spends time with her steady beau, first trumpet Trevor Casperson (the one who said, “Whoa!”).

Bennion makes light of her technically difficult instrument, which she has played since sixth grade: “What’s the difference between a French horn and a Scud missile? The Scud missile is more accurate.”

Her accuracy will be tested with the Tchaikovsky. No matter how she fares at Carnegie, however, it will be tough to top last summer, when she was selected for an honors orchestra and played Mozart’s jaunty First Horn Concerto in Vienna.

“Vienna changed me,” said Bennion, who will study music at Vanderbilt in the fall. “I had just started to take music seriously and I knew that I had a home on the stage, that I could make a living there.”

Her orchestra mates might not aim for musical careers, but they bring with them, or perhaps Schwabe unleashes, a love for the kind of music young people supposedly don’t listen to.

Rafael Ramos III, principal double bassist, commutes 40 traffic-clogged miles from Valencia to be a part of the symphony. Always “obsessed with music,” Ramos as a middle schooler would often practice piano 14 hours a day, unprodded.

He pays for car repairs and bass lessons with the earnings from his custodial job at a Santa Monica hospital, a job that is in constant jeopardy because of weekend orchestra commitments.

Like many other musicians, Ramos attends Samohi on a permit, for which his mother, a vocational nurse, qualified because she works in Santa Monica. Also from outside the city are concertmaster Garrett McLean of Venice and second-chair violin Minna Chen, from West Los Angeles. Both are top scholars, Chen headed to Stanford, McLean to UC Berkeley.

A beefy varsity swimmer and surfer, McLean also sings in the Testostertones, an a cappella group with which he recently performed in drag as Britney Spears. Music, he said, “requires discipline, a lot of which I haven’t attained yet.”

A few months ago, McLean and Chen had the heady experience of performing with the Samohi string quartet at the Pacific Palisades home of a prominent entertainment industry figure.

The event was a “cultivation dinner” for an unusual $15-million fund-raising effort designed to bolster arts education in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District. Among the guests was Mel Gibson, honorary co-chairman of the campaign, dubbed For the Arts ... For Every Child.

The district encompasses a wide range of children, from the privileged north of Montana Avenue and in the Malibu hills to those living in poverty in congested apartment corridors. The district has 16 schools with about 12,500 students; four schools receive federal aid for campuses with a high proportion of low-income families.

Dedication to Arts Despite Financial Woes

And, as with all school districts, there is never enough money--particularly for the arts. Still, 3,000-student Samohi has six choirs, five orchestras and seven bands.

Among the goals of the fund-raising drive will be restoring choral and visual arts instruction in the fourth and fifth grades. Those programs got snuffed out after California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978, capping property taxes, then the chief source of school funds.

Santa Monica parents have long complained that they must foot too much of the bill for the arts, even in a district that values and supports them more than most.

“Parents pay for sheet music, instrument repairs, after-school coaching,” said Steve Burleigh, a lead organizer of the Carnegie trip whose son, Nick, plays third-chair violin. “They [school officials] pride themselves on the quality of the program, but there’s no money.”

Consider the fund-raising that preceded the Carnegie Hall trip.

Orchestra members sent solicitation letters to everyone from orthodontists (at least one kicked in) to local firms and cultural institutions to uncles rich and poor.

They sold candy and raffle tickets, held a bowl-a-thon, washed cars. They pitched the Santa Monica City Council, which kicked in $15,000. Total raised: $50,000.

Meanwhile, parents researched flights, timpani and bass rentals, sightseeing jaunts and the best ways to pack instruments (lots of bubble wrap and duct tape). Most families paid $1,225 per student for a package that included hotel and air fare. The fund-raising provided scholarships for several other students.

Presiding over it all was Christopher Schwabe.

“Don’t talk, please!” he shouts at one evening rehearsal. “This is very frustrating, people. Time’s a-wastin’. I’m not happy.”

Schwabe got his music education degree from Indiana University and a master’s in cello, bass and conducting from Ball State University. He has taught in the district for 29 years, five at Samohi.

He commutes from Long Beach, arriving most days by 6:15 a.m. and staying until 5 p.m.--often later.

The students also put in extra time, some grudgingly, for private lessons and evening rehearsals. They have high-caliber coaching. Each Tuesday afternoon, Jack Cousin, a longtime double bass player with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, coaches the five bass players, including his ninth-grade son, Reuben.

Cousin urges the players to memorize fast passages because “your hand has to know it.” He sprinkles his instruction with comments such as, “When the Philharmonic would play this passage, Zubin”--as in Mehta--”used to like us to play the 16th note a little bit late to make it more dramatic.”

Edwin Outwater, a Samohi graduate who recently became the resident conductor for the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, guest-conducts one day in March.

Outwater chastises the musicians for continuing to play after he signals them to halt. “You guys don’t know how to stop,” he says. “Learn now.”

Funny. Schwabe tells them that all the time. Maybe he’s right.

Before they know it, Thursday, March 28, has arrived. Musicians and chaperons are to be at Los Angeles International Airport by 5 a.m.

Unknown to the trip planners, Ramos has booked his own flight, on a different airline. But he oversleeps and misses it. The orchestra departs without knowing whether their strongest bass will join them.

By evening, they are all gathered in the hotel lobby, eager to surge en masse through Times Square. Underscoring the coming-of-age nature of the trip, many are buoyed by the news, relayed by countless cell phones, that college acceptance letters have arrived in the mail back home.

Just in time, Ramos arrives with his hastily packed suitcase, from which he extracts his wadded-up concert jacket. It will have to serve for warmth, since his leather jacket remains on the living room floor in Valencia.

That evening and the next three days are a whirlwind of city touring, including an accidental subway ride to Brooklyn. On Friday and Saturday, through the blear of jet lag and late-night gallivanting, a transformation occurs. The musicians crowd into a rehearsal room on West 41st Street.

The importance of playing Carnegie Hall sinks in. “I didn’t understand how, like, big a deal it was,” Crespo-Szabo will say later. “But then I saw that Ani DiFranco”--a maverick folk-rock singer whom she idolizes--”was on the bill for April. I thought, ‘Wow, I beat her here!’ ”

They practice for two hours and it pays off gloriously, even though many musicians have to reposition their chairs on either side of wide pillars to see Schwabe, even though the rental basses are smaller than standard size, even though it’s dawn back home. One violinist nods off as he plays, his bow dropping toward the floor.

Perhaps it’s the collision of exhaustion and adrenaline, but their playing, as Schwabe might say, sparkles. Even that troublesome section at measure 414 shines.

Still, Schwabe keeps ironing out the kinks. “There’s never enough vibrato,” he tells the strings. “Warm it up, please. It would also be nice if the note wasn’t flat.”

Then there are the seemingly contradictory directions, the chore of a conductor keeping it all together: “Strings, don’t rush. Brass, don’t drag.”

Not Just Playing Notes, but Making Music

On concert night, Easter Sunday, the “Candide” has just finished and now comes the romantic and rip-roaring Fifth, Tchaikovsky’s ode to life and death and mankind’s drive to seek a happy ending in defiance of fate.

Bennion’s horn solo goes well, if a tad shakily at the start. She warms to it, gaining confidence as she goes, the melody blooming.

The ensemble roars through the fourth movement. It is everything Schwabe has asked for: aggressive, confident, powerful.

Suddenly, it is over. The audience is on its feet.

As Schwabe will say later: “It’s one thing to play the notes and in tune and with the proper dynamics. But they didn’t just play the notes. They made music.”

A ‘Sparkly’ Performance

May brings a bittersweet coda.

Beset by budget woes, the school district offers Schwabe and dozens of others early retirement. After much “deep soul-searching and torture,” Schwabe decides to exit on the high note of Carnegie. A presumably younger, and possibly cheaper, teacher will replace him.

As it turns out, the Carnegie triumph will be “Mr. Schwabe’s Opus.” In late May he announces his decision to his troops at the end of a rehearsal.

With tears streaming down his cheeks, he tells them: “You guys are really something. I’ve taught at five high schools. I’ve conducted a lot of honors orchestras. I’ve never had a group that achieved so high a level, ever.

“That performance, I’ll always hold dear to me. It was sparkly. I love you all.”

“We love you, too!” several students shout back. Then they burst into applause.

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Video interviews with Santa Monica High School Symphony conductor Christopher Schwabe and students Catherine Bennion and Rafael Ramos III accompany this story on The Times’ Web site. Go to latimes.com/orchestra.