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As the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra nears the final concerts of its 2024-2025 season, the preparations are marked with changes and farewells. One of those farewells is being made to not only one of the symphony’s longest-serving players, but also to one of the longest-tenured orchestra musicians in Canadian history.
Jan Kocman had just finished his master’s degree at Indiana University and had returned to his parents’ house in Hammond, Indiana. That’s when he received a call from Leonard Stone, the then-executive director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the group for whom he had auditioned some weeks earlier.
“Of course I was thrilled,” Kocman remembered in an interview on Morning Light.
Listen to more of Jan Kocman's interview with Nolan Kehler here:
Part of the thrill came from the reputation of the city’s music scene, which had been conveyed to him by one of his university instructors. Walter Kaufmann had been the first music director of the WSO in 1948, and, upon his departure in 1956, became a musicology professor at Indiana University where he made acquaintance with the young Kocman.
“I think he was very positive and particularly positive about some of the personnel that he had worked with here and knew that were still here performing here. I think in his tenure here of ten years, the symphony really grew a lot in stature, became something that was, you know, really happening for the Winnipeg community. I think he was very positive about doing this.”
Kocman’s tenure with the symphony, which began in 1974, has touched every single music director the group has ever had. He highlights each for the unique qualities that each of them brought – Piero Gamba, for his romantic era and Italian literature insights; Kazuhiro Koizumi for his Impressionist French insights; Bramwell Tovey, who “could do almost anything” (including a recital that Kocman remembers fondly on the concert hall stage); Andrey Boreyko, for the depth of his study and his knowledge; Alexander Mickelthwaite for his community connection and engagement (“You could go to Safeway and you could see Alexander looking at fruit!”); and now, Daniel Raiskin, whose new directions are much appreciated by the stalwart veteran.
With all of the musical changes have come cultural changes within the orchestra as well. “Remember that when I first came... some of the members, particularly of the woodwinds, were original members from 1948, 1951, et cetera. I think there were at least fifteen new players to the orchestra in general.” In his experience, the veterans at theat time made the new players feel welcome and helped them to adjust to what was a busy schedule, not only as musicians in the symphony, but also playing around town in other ensembles like the CBC Winnipeg Orchestra, which recorded in St. Boniface every week.
The community aspect of Kocman’s musical life in Winnipeg is something that he has seen change over the course of his tenure. “Our relationship with the community was interrupted by COVID, and that was hard.” Although the orchestra had numerous pandemic offerings, and numbers are slowly recovering, Kocman notes that engagement that the orchestra has with the community is far different than what it was earlier in his tenure.
“We’re not maybe at the point where we were before, but... over the next, I think, several years, there should be further growth and hopefully a real positive relationship between a larger community within Winnipeg and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.”
Kocman is looking forward to the next chapter, sitting in the red chairs in the audience from time-to-time, although it certainly won’t be the same. “I think we sit in the best seat in the house,” he says of his woodwinds. “We’re right in the middle of the orchestra. We have all the strings in front of us, to the sides of us, harp just a little bit to the side, the brass a little bit behind us... it’s the most fabulous place to sit.”
Until then, Kocman is soaking it all in, receiving various tributes including an honourary street name on Market Avenue on the south side of the Centennial Concert Hall. “I’m deeply touched by how people have reacted to my retirement and the knowledge they have now about my length of career here,” he says. “I’ve asked the question many times, ‘What were you doing when in 1974 of September, and most of them say, ‘I wasn’t born.’”
