Victor & Gianella

Gianella de Marco of Pescara, Italy, is a leggy little eight-year-old with mouse-colored hair and smoky blue eyes. She may also be one of the most remarkable musical talents in a generation. Fortnight ago, with a doll or two packed in her luggage along with her batons, Gianella arrived in England to rehearse the famed London Philharmonic for performances in Manchester and London.

Philharmonic musicians were not impressed at the prospect. "If an eight-year-old thinks she can teach anything to an experienced orchestra like the L.P.O.," one of them fumed. "I'll teach my grandmother to suck eggs." They confidently expected to have their own way with the music: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Haydn's Symphony No. 73, and the William Tell overture. But they were in for a rude shock. The young maestrina had her own ideas about tempo--generally she likes it faster than the London Philharmonic does--and she rapped them to a halt time & again to tell them so.

There were moments of muttering that almost came to open revolt. Once Gianella herself was so upset that she flounced to the back of the podium where she had propped up a doll named Victor, and told Victor: "Bambini! Tutti bambini! [Children! They're all children!]." But by the end of the rehearsal, most of the orchestra was won over. "She was right every time she pulled us up," said a violinist. "She's a genius," said a cellist.

A Trance? Gianella's parents, Building Engineer Lido de Marco and his wife, an ex-opera singer, got their first clue to the youngster's phenomenal talent when she was four. They came home one night to find Gianella standing up in bed, her eyes shut, conducting an imaginary orchestra to the strains of Beethoven's Fifth on a neighbor's radio. Papa de Marco, shrugged the incident off as "some sort of trance."

But Mama de Marco took Gianella off to a musician, whose skepticism quickly turned to astonishment. At 4 1/2, she made her Rome debut at the St. Cecilia Academy. A few months later, she appeared in Spain, South America and Paris, and was touted by such famed conductors as Wilhelm Furtwaengler and Victor de Sabata (for whom she named her doll)--all before she could read a note of music. When she was seven, Gianella decided she wanted to conduct opera, buckled down for ten months of study. She made her debut with Traviata, in Ravenna, and now knows 18 operas.

An Itch. Before her British debut in Manchester last week, the public was as skeptical as the musicians of the L.P.O. had been. The hall was less than half full. But at the end of the performance, most of the audience stood up to cheer. Two nights later, 6,000 Londoners watched and listened while Gianella guided the orchestra with professional aplomb. Gianella started badly, muffing the opening bars of the overture to Der Freischuetz, but soon found herself. Then came Haydn's Symphony No. 73--with Gianella and the L.P.O. outdoing themselves--and the Tannhaeuser overture. By this time, the Albert Hall audience was applauding wildly--though whether from seeing a conductor who unabashedly scratched her bottom during the Haydn or from pure admiration of her musicianship, it was not yet apparent. But after a roof-raising Beethoven Fifth and a racing William Tell, there was no doubt about Gianella's acceptance. While Albert Hall stood and cheered, she took a bouquet and threw it flower by flower at her audience.

The critics, though inclined to deplore child prodigies in principle, tossed a few bouquets of their own. "Really good performances, a credit to conductress and players alike," said the News Chronicle. "Genuine, albeit immature, musicianship," said the Times. Self-critical Conductress de Marco decided it had been a "pretty good" performance.

Whether prodigious Gianella de Marco will really fulfill her promise as a musician is obviously a question for the future. But at week's end, with the London Philharmonic and the London public snugly in the palm of her hand, she was aiming at further acceptance. Gianella wrote a letter to "Cara Regina Elisabetta," inviting the Queen to attend her concert next week.

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