'They are the symphony': WSO celebrates 77th season with legacy musicians

Inside the Centennial Concert Hall, a booming sound fills the air as the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra rehearses during its 77th season. Concertmaster Gwen Hoebig is playing the violin with her contemporaries just as she’s done since 1987.

But this year will be her last. After 37 seasons, as captain of the orchestra, Hoebig is retiring from the symphony.

“The ability to play music together in a large ensemble is something I’ve always loved,” Hoebig said.

“All of the wonderful performances there have been over the years and all the wonderful performances still to come, I love what I do, but it’s time for me to just take it a little bit easier.”

Gwen Hoebig has been concertmaster of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra since 1987. The violin is an instrument she has played since she was five years old. Over the course of her 37 seasons with the orchestra she has performed in hundreds of shows. Her musical family will be celebrated with the WSO next spring with a special concert lined up with two dates in May. Here she is practicing on the violin after a rehearsal on Wednesday Sept. 25, 2024. (Joseph Bernacki/CTV News Winnipeg)

Hoebig first picked up the violin at age five and has not put it down since.

“It's the voice that I can create through the sound, the voice I can create through the violin, and how it can express what I feel words can't express,” Hoebig said.

She describes music as the family business. She’s passed that on to her kids, who are following in her footsteps.

“We did not necessarily want them to be musicians,” Hoebig said.

“Being a musician is a difficult and not always financially rewarding position, but they saw our love for it, they see us playing and now we can play together.”

Hoebig has been surrounded by music for years as her husband David Moroz has made a name as a Canadian pianist. Moroz, Hoebig, and her brother Desmond, a cellist, have had a musical trio together for years.

Her children, Alexander and Juliana, play the viola and cello, respectively. When’s she not working on the next piece with the symphony, she continues to teach violin to young musicians across the province.

'A quiet force'

Daniel Raiskin, music director of the WSO has led the orchestra since 2018. He admires Hoebig’s ability to get the most from her colleagues and remembers feeling a great sense of understanding and respect when they first worked together three years before.

“She’s not just a wonderful violinist and good person, but she’s kind of a quiet force around which everything falls into a place,” Raiskin said.

“It’s really important to have a few people, a few personalities in the orchestra, which are the pillars you know holding the whole thing together.”

The same could be said for Principal Flutist Jan Kocman. The elder statesman of the WSO’s woodwinds section is celebrating his 51st season with the orchestra.

Kocman said playing in front of thousands of people keeps his drive going.

“Mentally, it’s incredible how many literally tens of thousands of notes I probably read every year,” Kocman said.

“You really need to play well and at the same time experience this incredible art, great art form of symphonic literature.”

Kocman joined the WSO in 1974 and is the longest-serving principal musician in the orchestra’s history.

'I know stories about when it first began'

“It's fun, it gives me a perspective that nobody else has here about the orchestra,” Kocman said.

“I know stories about when it first began.”

Growing up in Hammond, Indiana, Kocman first picked up the flute at age eight. Living near the Windy City gave him opportunities to gain exposure to the world of classical and symphonic melodies.

“My early years, I would go in and my father would take me to hear the Chicago Symphony when I was eight, nine, ten, 12 years old,” Kocman said.

“Fritz Reiner was the music director at the time. He's one of the great music directors of the 20th century.”

After watching his father play in the Chicago Heights Symphony Orchestra in a nearby suburb, Kocman was determined to study music at Indiana University.

It was there that he made a connection with the WSO’s first music director Walter Kaufmann who worked with the orchestra from 1948 to 1956.

Kaufmann was working as an instructor at the university and suggested to Kocman that there could be a future playing in Manitoba.

“This also inspired me, I think, and finding Winnipeg,” Kocman said.

When he first started, he said it was a pleasure working for then-music director Piero Gamba and has fond memories of traveling to Carnegie Hall with the WSO in 1979.

“Piero Gamba was quite a dynamo and really a beautiful musician,” Kocman said.

“He had to work, vigorously. We had a lot of new people in the orchestra when I first came, and it was a very super positive experience with him.”

There’s a piece of trivia behind the Verne Q. Powell model flute that Kocman has used since he purchased the instrument in 1989. The instrument is the same age as the musician.

Made in 1950 in Boston, Massachusetts, Kocman said one of his first teachers was the Principal Flutist of the Detroit Symphony.

A wealthy gentleman from Detroit purchased the instrument made by Powell and lent the instrument to Kocman’s teacher.

Jan Kocman (centre) first picked up the flute at age eight. Growing up in northern Indiana, Kocman’s father would bring him to watch the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play in Chicago which he recalls was his first exposure to symphonic scores and classical music. Here he is seen rehearsing with his contemporaries on Wednesday Sept. 25, 2024. (Joseph Bernacki/CTV News Winnipeg)

Years later in Winnipeg, the same individual asked Kocman if he would like to purchase it. It was everything he could ever ask for from an instrument.

“It has an incredibly beautiful sound, a dark sound, very rich in color, and it blends in very well and but also projects incredibly well,” Kocman said.

Raiskin enjoys his conversations with Kocman and his ability to take him back to what the symphony was like 50 years ago.

'These people are the keepers'

“These people are the keepers,” Raiskin said.

“We cannot afford losing too often, the really great musicians who decided to come to Winnipeg and want to stay here, because there's not so much we can replace them with on-site. Those who decide to stay and build this wonderful organization, deserve the greatest acknowledgments because they are the symphony.”

Kocman said he will miss Hoebig’s leadership after this season and said there’s an interior bond between musicians playing together all the time.

“The person sitting next to me when they first came, Doug Bairstow, on oboe had been here, I think maybe 7 or 8 years before me,” Kocman said.

“He and I played together for, I don't know, 35 years. I mean, there was something I think really special about that.”

On May 10 and 11, 2025, the WSO has a special concert planned to celebrate Gwen Hoebig. She is expected to be joined by family members as musicians alongside the orchestra’s full splendor of sound.