Dr. Michael Culig grew up playing music, from learning the violin as a grade school student in McKeesport to performing with the Junior Tamburitzans.

He and his Harvard University roommate and best friend, Joseph Papandrea, who played the accordion, enjoyed performing together at Boston gigs.

“We used to serenade young ladies. We were never successful,” joked Dr. Culig, director of cardiac surgery for Excela Health in Westmoreland County.

Over the Christmas holidays, Dr. Culig, 65, of Shadyside, took the (refurbished over the years) $35 violin his parents bought him in the sixth grade to the intensive care unit of Excela Health Westmoreland Hospital in Greensburg.

For those patients who agreed, he played traditional holiday tunes — “Silent Night,” “Away in a Manger,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

As he played, staff working in the ICU gathered to listen and applaud.

Due to COVID-19, “This year has been extremely rough on the caregivers. The knowledge that [some patients] did not have to be here if they had gotten vaccinated … It just tears people’s hearts out,” Dr. Culig said.

A colleague’s nudge

Janeen Stepinsky, a cardio-thoracic physician’s assistant with Excela Health, said she and Dr. Culig immediately clicked after his arrival at the health system a few years ago.

“He often talked about all of the musical instruments he’s played over the years,” she said.

Dr. Culig also performs with the Pittsburgh Mandolin Orchestra.

Ms. Stepinsky said she “put a bug in his ear,” suggesting he play for patients in the hospital.

“He was really happy to do it,” she said.

It was something he had done previously at other hospitals where he’s worked, but the two holiday ICU performances were his first for Excela, Dr. Culig said.

“I was there the whole time he played. Some of the staff actually had tears in their eyes. It’s been a stressful two years. This was something happy,” Ms. Stepinsky said.

“He’s actually a very humble person. I don’t think he would have just brought [his violin] in and played. I think he needed to be encouraged,” she said.

For weeks afterward, she said, people came up to Dr. Culig to talk with him about his playing.

Ms. Stepinsky, too, has seen how thin health care workers have been spread throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I just thought it would be something very special for him to do. I knew it would be a nice thing for everybody. It turned out 20 times better than I thought,” she said.

Medicine and music

He attended what was then White Oak Elementary School. “From what I remember I came home and said to my parents, ‘Can I play an instrument?’ ‘Sure,’ my dad said. ‘You’re going to play the violin.’ I was fine with it. I was a good little boy,” he said, laughing.

Around middle school, he was on the fence a bit about continuing to play. His parents gave him a choice, he said.

“I had a choice to do that or something that was more onerous,” he joked.

He also performed with the Junior Tamburitzans in McKeesport, playing standup bass. And he learned to play the brac, a four-stringed instrument played like a mandolin.

“My father was Croatian. My parents thought it was a good experience for their children,” he said.

During high school, he auditioned for and was accepted into the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra, leading to travel in Europe for a music festival after his sophomore year.

While in Monte Carlo, he performed for Princess Grace and shook her hand in a receiving line. There, he and his friends tried to sneak into a casino in Monte Carlo. They also discovered topless beaches.

“It was a real eye opener,” Dr. Culig said, laughing.

“Music was a huge part of my life. When I finished high school that was a choice — either go into music or go into something else. … I was good in science, and I enjoyed that. [Medicine] was more practical,” he said.

He continued to play music in college, with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and with Mr. Papandrea, who introduced him to the mandolin and also had a domra, a Russian, long-necked, stringed instrument and an interest in Slavic folk music.

“He knew all of the popular music because he had been playing weddings and bar mitzvahs. And I knew a lot of that music from the Tamburitzans. It was a lot of what we played. … He was like a musical genius,” Dr. Culig said.

“He was tied in to the Slavic folk music scene in Boston. We would go and play [when] a Soviet destroyer would dock in Boston. The sailors would get off and there would be a reception for them, and we would be the ones playing Russian music for them, which they didn’t care about. All they wanted to hear was rock ‘n’ roll,” he said.

At their 25th college reunion, Mr. Papandrea announced he had signed them up for a talent show at the university’s Sanders Theatre.

“He says, ‘I got a mandolin for you,’” Dr. Culig recalled.

What followed, he said, was a comedy routine reminiscent of the immigrant brothers — “two wild and crazy guys” — Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd played on “Saturday Night Live.”

“He had these striped socks that we put on over our pants, I had a sport coat that was too small. We started off by playing a tuning routine,” he said, imitating squeaks and squonks.

“Then we launched into the accordion and mandolin. We’d get to the chorus, ‘Oh, I don’t want her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me.’ We brought down the house. …. We had the audience on its feet, clapping and singing along. I was always the straight guy. I never complained about it because it was always fun,” he said.

Still carrying a tune

For the last five years, Dr. Culig has performed with the Pittsburgh Mandolin Orchestra.

The group of about 25 musicians has been on hiatus due to the pandemic, said music director Charley Rappaport.

He plans to schedule a concert in May. The orchestra typically plays at venues around Pittsburgh as well as in churches, schools and nursing homes.

The orchestra keeps alive music from the golden age of mandolin, from about 1900 to 1925, he said.

“Dr. Culig is our concertmaster, first chair. It’s a leadership position,” Mr. Rappaport said.

“I met him through his older brother, another orchestra member. … I was courting him for a number of years. One day he came to a concert or a rehearsal. He is our most devoted member now.”

Mary Pickels is a freelance writer: marypickels@gmail.com and on Twitter @mary_pickels.

First Published: February 13, 2022, 11:30 a.m.
Updated: February 13, 2022, 2:34 p.m.