Playing Carnegie Hall in New York City is a dream most musicians wait a lifetime to achieve, but a 6-year-old violinist didn’t have to wish it for very long.
Burbank resident Kaylee Madison Chiang, who attends McKinley Elementary School, played in the prestigious hall on April 1 with fellow youngsters in the South Pasadena Strings Program.
“I liked it because we played beautiful music and I like listening to it,” she said. “It’s fun playing with my friends.”
The classical music program for violin and cello comprises musicians ages 4 1/2 to 12. There are two orchestras, the training orchestra and the children’s orchestra.
An audio tape of the children’s orchestra was submitted to The World Projects International Band and Orchestra Festival and was accepted, said Susan Pascale who has co-owned the business with her husband, A.J. Pascale, for eight years.
Susan Pascale never got to perform at Carnegie Hall herself, but she said conducting her orchestra there was overwhelming, she said.
“Just to conduct there it’s like now I’ve done everything,” she said. “The experience is beyond words. I was the luckiest person to be on stage where all these famous people were before me.”
The Pasadena group was the youngest at the festival. All the others were high school musical groups, she said. Only two schools received the top Gold rating, and the South Pasadena Strings Program was one of them.
They’ve even applied to receive recognition in the Guinness Book of World Records that their group was the youngest ever recorded to perform at Carnegie Hall, she said. They have also applied for the same honor from the World Records Academy, an international organization that certifies world records.
“But we know in our hearts that we are,” she said.
The parents were all instrumental in making the trip a success, said Tracy Chiang, Kaylee’s mother.
“As a parent, it’s an amazing group of parents that pulled together to make [this trip] happen,” she said. “Every kid had at least one parent if not the whole family flying to New York.”
Kaylee’s experience with the program has been inspiring from the start, her mother said. Kaylee had grown bored of private lessons to the point that she didn’t even want to play any longer.
But once she started the training orchestra, she loved playing again, Tracy Chiang said.
