Sour note: Nikki Rowe virtuoso forgoes Juilliard due to high cost, family ties

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EDINBURG — Robert Kohler entered Omar Estrella’s apartment carrying his large double bass inside a large black bag.

Estrella helped his 18-year-old student get settled in, setting up a stool and a music stand while Kohler took the large wooden string instrument out of the bag.

As Kohler placed his sheet music on the stand, Estrella asked him about one of the three pieces he was preparing, particularly one written by Italian composer Vittorio Monti called “Csárdás.”

“How are those false harmonics coming along?” Estrella asked about the difficult technique of holding a string down with one finger while lightly touching the string with another to create a high-pitched note — similar to the sound of a dog whistle.

“That’s the easy part,” Kohler said.

A look of bewilderment came over Estrella’s face. “Ok,” he said, visibly shocked by his young student’s response. “That’s not normal.”

Perhaps not normal for the average double bass player — but Kohler is anything but average. He demonstrates this immediately after he tunes the strings of his instrument. He tears into Vittorio Monti’s “Csárdás,” moving his hands up and down the neck of the double bass, holding a string down and shaking his hand slightly to create a delicate vibrato — his instrument emitting a sound as if it were weeping.

“Nice!” Estrella said during a quick break from the piece. “I feel like you could be a little more aggressive at times — maybe not the whole time, but go off to some degree.”

Kohler, a senior at Nikki Rowe High School in McAllen, is a precocious musician, and Estrella has been guiding his seemingly natural talent in a direction that has led him to his third consecutive seat on the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, as well as earning an acceptance letter to the prestigious ​​performing arts conservatory, Juilliard — Kohler’s dream school.

“I usually stick to music,” he said. “I don’t really do much outside of that.”

Kohler first picked up the double bass when he was a sixth-grader at Fossum Middle School.

“He came with the big bass and he didn’t know how to hold it,” Kohler’s mother, Marisol, recalled earlier this week. “I was so scared that he was going to get frustrated with it.”

“We didn’t know how he was going to get it in the car,” his father, Robert, said. “I thought I’d have to buy a truck or something.”

But the double bass called out to him.

“(It was) the sound that I heard from it when I was picking up the instrument,” Kohler said. “I was intrigued by how powerful it sounded. It just had some weight. The sound had some weight, and it was just a really strong sound.”

Estrella said Kohler’s middle school orchestra director, Brian Miller — who also became his orchestra director at Nikki Rowe — reached out to him about Kohler after recognizing his natural ability.

“When he was there at Fossum, he’d already seen the immense potential at a young age, as a seventh-grader,” Estrella recalled. “He was like, ‘There seems to be a lot more here than I can lead at the time.’”

Estrella said Miller was aware of his track record when it comes to shaping young string musicians into virtuosos.

Kohler, who seems more mature than his 18 years, was impressively disciplined and professional even at a young age, Estrella recalled. He was struck by Kohler’s direction and ambition — to make the double bass his vessel for beautiful music.

“From an early age, usually you don’t get this type of serious commitment from a student until at least sophomore or junior year,” Estrella said. “Normally, it takes a little longer for that seriousness to kick in. At seventh grade, as soon as I met him, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to be good.’”

The two have worked diligently since then, perfecting Kohler’s musical craft in the hopes of helping him achieve his dream of attending Juilliard. A dream that Kohler decided to pursue when he was in seventh grade.

“It’s a dream of mine,” Kohler said. “I didn’t expect to be here right now, playing the way I am right now. It was a distant dream, like maybe I could get into Juilliard or some top school like that.”

So he took a leap of faith.

“I was like, ‘I’m feeling good, so I might as well try,” Kohler said.

It was more than a good feeling.

In March, a drowsy Kohler woke up to find himself questioning reality.

“It was late at night, so I wasn’t too awake,” Kohler said about finding out he had been accepted to Juilliard.

His dream school was no longer a fantasy.

An acceptance letter arrived from Juilliard — a school with a 7.6% acceptance rate. For perspective, Harvard has a 5% acceptance rate.

“When I saw it, I was like, ‘Oh, alright,’” Kohler said, inexplicably underwhelmed.

But a sobering reality followed.

“Yeah, I’m not going,” Kohler said. “It’s too expensive.”

Tuition for new students at Juilliard is estimated to cost $51,230 for a school year, according to Juilliard’s website. With all the other expenses including lodging, student health insurance, books and supplies, the website estimates a year of school will cost students an estimated $79,572.

There were other heartstrings Kohler didn’t want to break.

“I asked him, ‘Don’t go too far away. I need to see you,’” his mother, Marisol, said following his senior recital Wednesday evening. “He said, ‘Ok, I’m going to try Southern Methodist University.’ Juilliard is very expensive. He got a very good scholarship from SMU, almost a full ride.”

“The thing is that he still can finish his master’s (degree) at Juilliard,” his father added.

Kohler performed three pieces during his senior recital: Monti’s “Csárdás”; Giovanni Bottesini’s “Passione Amorosa” — which is made up of three movements: Allegro Deciso, Andante, and Allegretto; and Bottesini’s “Concerto for Double Bass in B Minor” — which is also made up of three movements: Moderato, Andante, and Finale: Allegro.

He was joined onstage by Stacy Kwak on piano and his friend Israel MacDonald on double bass.

Following Kohler’s performance inside the Nikki Rowe High School Auditorium, his parents beamed with pride over his accomplishments.

“It’s been a glorious time,” his father said. “He’s just matured every year into a young man that’s — I’m totally proud of him.”

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Monitor staff writer Valerie Gonzalez contributed to this story.