Former child prodigy conducted WSO at Carnegie Hall

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This article was published 15/02/2022 (1700 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Conductor Piero Gamba is remembered as always wanting the best for the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and its musicians.

The Italian maestro, who was the WSO’s music director from 1971 to 1980, died in a New York hospital Monday. He was 85.

Jan Kocman, the orchestra’s principal flutist and one of a handful of musicians Gamba hired who remain on the WSO roster in 2022, has vivid memories of those performances with the symphony.

“One of the most beautiful things I think about him on the podium, particularly for the principal players, was when you played something (and) he really liked how you did it, right in the concert, you could tell by his reaction on the podium,” Kocman says. “The facial expression, the smile, the exuberance he would show you personally about your solo was very unusual. He showed you immediately that he really loved what you just did.”

Gamba’s connections in the classical music world showed in the famous guest soloists he was able to attract to the Centennial Concert Hall stage. There would be one celebrated performer after another joining the WSO during the 1970s, says James Manishen, who played clarinet with the orchestra under Gamba’s direction and has since become the organization’s historian.

“He knew all the big names in the music world and it really benefited the WSO and its audiences,” Manishen says. “He could call up (legendary violinist and conductor) Yehudi Menuhin without going through an agent.”

The Rome-born conductor and pianist used those contacts to join the WSO in its debut performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1979. Menuhin was part of the show, along with Canadian opera star Maureen Forrester and French flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal. Actor Peter Ustinov was the MC.

“Piero had all these remarkable musicians, almost like personal friends, that he invited, and when you read through the roster of guest artists who came to Winnipeg to perform with us or at Carnegie Hall, it was like the top of the world in terms of guest artists,” Kocman says.

“It was a very special moment, and unfortunately it all turned around because of economics.”

Overwhelming debt threatened the WSO’s future in 1980 and Gamba resigned in September of that year after a dispute with members of the WSO’s board.

He also incurred $100,000 in losses from the Carnegie Hall show; he was still paying down the debt in 1986 when he returned to Winnipeg as a guest conductor. He dismissed his debt, saying it was only money.

“The glory was for everybody. The loss was only mine,” he said in a Free Press interview prior to the 1986 concert.

An album from the concert recording was released in 1980, one of four records Gamba and the WSO released during his tenure.

Gamba moved to Australia and conducted several orchestras there, and later did the same in Uruguay. He eventually used New York as his base in between guest-conducting appearances around the world.

Gamba’s life was conducting, and he became a celebrity in his native Italy long before he made his way to Winnipeg.

He was a child prodigy as a conductor, then known as Pierino Gamba, and at 10 years old, he gained fame leading orchestras with musicians who were old enough to be his parents and grandparents all around Europe.

Italian newsreel footage from 1946, since upoaded to YouTube, shows the young Gamba standing on a large block while conducting Rossini’s William Tell Overture.

When the WSO returned to Carnegie Hall in 2014, Gamba was there to enjoy the performance and Kocman remembers the warm greeting the maestro gave the musicians.

“I really think he loved the WSO,” Kocman says. “I would guess it was probably one of the great highlights of his career to have conducted us for those years.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall