As he grew up, senior Lucas Pagano watched his sister play the violin, and it inspired him to play music himself. Now, Pagano and his sister bond while playing music together.
“We like to play duets,” Pagano said. “She’s always there. If I need help with lessons, she is a big help for me here in this All-State process and Region process. Anytime I needed a little extra help, I could always go over to her house and she would walk me through it.”
Pagano got 16th in Area for All-State Orchestra for viola, barely missing the cut off for state. He earned the highest award for orchestra in Kingwood Park history.
“It was a big shock,” Pagano said. “After the audition, I wasn’t very confident that I would make it as high as I did. It wasn’t my best performance. One of the little excerpts they have you play just wasn’t there, so I thought I was out. But knowing that I was 16, even though it wasn’t my favorite playing performance, was really cool.”
Pagano started preparing for this competition near the end of junior year. At the beginning of May of last year, they were given the first set of études – which are practices for specific skills for their instrument – to learn in preparation of the actual pieces that are assigned in September.
Pagano spent many flex hours with orchestra teacher Evan Farmer going through each excerpt and his recordings of them, breaking down every detail and movement to help Pagano prepare.
“I think Lucas gets really hard on himself, which is why he is so good at what he does,” Farmer said. “So some of that is once we kind of break everything down, is building him back up to where he has that full faith in his abilities, to kind of get him back up to everything’s going to be okay.”
They then recorded a video to submit at the end of October where Pagano played six music excerpts back to back.
“You’re never going to get the perfect snapshot of your playing from these auditions, because you’re always going to make a dumb mistake here or there, just from nerves and from exhaustion of playing 15 minutes of music back to back to back to back without, you know, a chance to catch your breath,” Pagano said. “So it’s a very intimidating day. It’s just sitting there and hoping it’s good enough.”
Along with Pagano, sophomore Brock Hirschfield, freshman Eden Rotberg and junior Ian Ferguson were also invited to try out for All-State orchestra. They got the results in November, one month after they submitted the auditions. In addition, the orchestra had 12 students, which included five seniors, qualify to play in the Region orchestra.
“Lucas, as well as just, I think this entire senior group is a really special, special group,” Farmer said. “They really just work so well together. I’m going to really miss all of them. I think that at our first booster club meeting in August, we started talking about graduation and stuff like that, and I was like it’s only August and I’m already crying. It’s just they’re just a special group.”
