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FWIW, Zimbalist's father was a well-known violin maestro. My guess is Jr. was the MC at this event.
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I remember hearing about these, but wasn't anywhere they were happening.
Of course, more a stunt than a real concert. But would have been fun to hear once. Here's a review from another in '79 in New York.
Concert: Gottschalk Extravaganza
By Joseph Horowitz
May 4, 1979
EUGENE LIST, a pianist who has done as much as anyone to win posthumous fame for Louis Moreau Gottschalk, presided at a three-hour “monster concert” in Gottschalk's memory Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall. It was a glorious idea, but it didn't quite come off.
Mr. List assembled 42 pianists for the occasion, which fell six days before the 150th anniversary of Gottschalk's birth in New Orleans. Gottschalk himself, the most original American composer and most celebrated American pianist of his day, was a past master at producing such extravaganzas. Once, in Havana, he put together a 650-piece orchestra, augmented by 232 additional singers, drummers and trumpeters.
Mr. List's monster concert merely crammed 10 Steinways onstage, where they looked almost as impressive as a herd of beached whales. The program mainly consisted of multipiano versions of such resurrected keyboard favorites as “Le Bananier” and“The Banjo.” There were also some pieces by Stephen Foster, and gargantuan piano renditions of overtures by Weber and Rossini, and of Saint-Saëns's “Danse macabre.”
With its saucy rhythms, gaudy colors and catchy tunes, Gottschalk's music certainly deserves the revival Mr. List has helped motivate. By mixing plantation, West Indian and Latin American strains with the elegance of the salon, and the polished showmanship of the concert hall, Gottschalk was an inspired purveyer of cultivated ïnaiveté, and characteristically American.
The big pieces on Mr. List's program were offered on as many as 10 keyboards by as many as 20 pianists, but they weren't really 10-piano pieces, and that was one of the evening's drawbacks. Gottschalk's,. transcription of Weber's “Oberon” Overture, for instance, is compactly scored for one piano, four-hands. Once the visual spectacle had worn thin, it really didn't stand to gain much, even in terms of sheer volume, by being multiplied by 10.
Significantly, the two-piano, eighthand “Dame macabre” adaptation, by Ernest Guiraud, produced a bigger, richer 10-piano sound than the expanded Gottschalk duets, and so did the massed tremolos and alternating octaves in Victor Savant's 10-piano reconstruction of Gottschalk's “The Siege of Saragossa.” Mr. Savant's 10-piano arrangement of “The Banjo,” however, was about 10 times less effective than a first-rate performance of Gottschalk's one-piano version, with its hair-raising skips.
In the final analysis, what the concert lacked, more than anything, were the services of a virtuoso musician to put the music across with more personality and panache. In a sense, the missing ingredient was Louis Moreau Gottschalk himself.
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/05/04/archives/concert-gottschalk-extravaganza.html
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