Ernest Gamble Concert Party

              Ernest Gamble Concert Party

Figure


Musical Portraits
 Tour Director:  Charles Wilson Gamble, Davis Theatre Building Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U. S. A.






D
O you long for the thrill of really good music, delightfully and vitally done by real, flesh-and-blood artists, who perform to your heart rather than over your head?




The Ernest Gamble Concert Party is just such a one.  There is a finish, a polish, a variety, an attractiveness and an educational value to its programs not often encountered on the concert stage.




Its tours have taken it over most of the civilized world, from the equator to the Arctic circle.  It has crossed the Atlantic twenty-two times.  It has made five tours of the West Indies and Central America, two of Mexico, and twenty-one across the continent.  It is the only American company to have made a successful tour of Northern Africa.  It is known wherever good music is loved.



Figure


The Toreador


Ours is an age of visualization.  The eye is captain of the senses.  Television is around the corner.  Pictorial periodicals are popular.  Sunday papers have elaborate illustrated sections.  In education visualization looms large.  In keeping with this trend of the times, The Gamble Party has evolved a unique and colorful plan of program presentation with an appeal to the eye as well as to the ear.




Each selection is given before a special scene, in appropriate costume, with action and lighting effects thus enhancing its value and making good music understandable and enjoyable by musicians and laymen.  It becomes a miniature drama, a 
Musical Portrait.



Figure


Verna Page and Her Old Gagliano Violin


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Madame Butterfly


One Fine Day
 from Madame Butterfly takes on meaning when sung in a beautiful oriental costume in Butterfly's wisteria garden overlooking Nagasaki harbor.  The woes of the Redman are poignant when one hears Verna Page, in striking white buckskin, play Dvorak-Kreisler's 
Indian Lament
 on her precious old (1736) Gagliano violin.




For example, Schubert's Ave Maria is played before a replica of the famous Rose Window of Rheims Cathedral.  One fairly hears the 
bravos!
 of the Latins of the Plaza de Toros, Granada when Ernest Gamble, as the gallant bull-fighter, dashes off the stirring Toreador's Song from 
Carmen.




Each concert includes lots of joy, a little sorrow, a flair of fun, a dash of melody, a few laughs and a big dramatic thrill.




Ernest Gamble was solo bass at Trinity Church, New York.  He sang the 
Creation
 with the Pacific Choral Society at the San Francisco Exposition, with St. George's Choral Society, London, at the Binghamton May Festival.  Nineteen State Universities, one hundred forty colleges and hundreds of high schools, clubs, musical societies, have had The Gambles with the utmost satisfaction.  The personnel consists of basso cantante, violin and soprano, an ideal combination for solos, duos, trios and obbligati selections.



Figure


The Bell Song from 
Lakme




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Duet from Mozart's 
Don Giovanni



The delightful violinist, Verna Page, long identified with the Gamble Party, still enhances its programs with the sympathetic strains of her old Gagliano violin, made in Cremona in 1736.




There is a charm, a subtlety and a spiritual quality about Verna Page's violin playing that puts her at once in the artist class.  She comes on the platform free from mannerisms, full of graciousness and desire to please.  She is a pupil of Jacobssohn, Chicago, Max Bendix, Michael Banner, Ovide Musin and Alois Trnka in New York and of Karl Halir, Berlin.




The Ernest Gamble Concert Party offers something unique, colorful and different in concert presentation.  The best in music is offered in a way that grips even the unmusical and children.  The programs are not so severely classical as not to be popular and not so popular as to be musically cheap.  Each selection becomes a miniature drama.



Figure


Ernest Gamble


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During one single season the Gamble Party appeared in thirty - three States and five countries and traveled 43,922 miles.  It is the only company with sufficient prestige and popularity to be booked direct by post and at invariable guarantees.  It has been in such demand with educational institutions that the list of schools and colleges reads like an educational directory.