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Gisèle Ben-Dor Earns Accolades as a Conductor Totally in Charge
August 3-9, 1995

Last week an abbreviated Mostly Mozart festival and the 31st season of free summer concerts by the New York Philharmonic in the city’s parks opened on the same night. This reporter opted for the Philharmonic, not only because Mostly Mozart on this occasion was mostly familiar (including today’s most overexposed pianist, Alicia de Larrocha), but also because America’s oldest orchestra was being conducted for the first scheduled time by Gisèle Ben-Dor, a young lady who created quite a stir two years ago when she made an unscheduled and unrehearsed debut as a last-minute replacement for the ailing Kurt Masur.

Ben-Dor’s formidable curriculum vitae was included in Joan Lindstrom’s extensive article on her which appeared in the July 20 issue, and I urge you to read it. At any rate, she more than lived up to her credentials as well as the hoopla preceding her. Like Masur I was under the weather for her debut so her July 25 concert was a first for me, and a mightily impressive first at that.

The Philharmonic program, on paper, could have been dismissed as a typical summer pops concert, and indeed the music was basically Muzak for the out-of-doors set. But Ben-Dor obviously didn’t hear this program like that. Everything she did made the pieces sound as fresh and exciting as when we first encountered them. Right from the opening ebullient measures of the three dances from “On the Town” by her onetime mentor Leonard Bernstein, we recognized a musician totally in charge of every page and every player.

Ben-Dor exudes charismatic authority that can only come from total preparedness and a deeply abiding love for each score. At the risk of seeming chauvinistic, I must note that unlike most female conductors, whose arms too often beat up and down the same way, her hands work independently of each other, dividing beat, expression and cues evenly. She therefore leaves absolutely no doubt as to what she wants, and what she wanted from the orchestra is what she got.

Suffice it to say I’ve never heard a more winning performance of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony – pulsating yet full of resilient grace and flexibility. Too bad Ben-Dor didn’t elect to play the entire “Three Cornered Hat” ballet of Manuel De Falla, since the second suite of three dances performed was of true 12-year-old Fundador vintage. Not even Fernando Arbos’ legendary recording had more appeal.

A Quibble of Choice

One could quibble over Ben-Dor’s choice of what to play as the concluding Suite from Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.” Supposedly the one heard July 25 had the imprimatur of the composer, but so far no one has owned up to concocting this clumsy, disjointed potpourri. Why the much better suite arranged by Antal Dorati (which most definitely met with Strauss’ approval) is hardly ever played is truly baffling. Be that as it may, Ben-Dor, through her perfect control of rubato, instrumental balance and color, made such a gorgeous silk purse out of this sow’s ear, it became manifest that she should conduct the entire opera as soon as possible.

As is customary at these summer events, various city dignitaries were on hand to make welcoming speeches and, in the case of Mayor Giuliani, stay for at least half the concert. The usual Grucci fireworks went off at the conclusion, but they weren’t any more impressive than the fireworks that exuded from the Carlos Moseley Pavilion Stage that night.

Larks ascending in Ozawa Hall
June 1, 1998

… Conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor proved that all an old war-horse needs to bring it back to life is a little imagination and a lot of heart.

… the Pro Arte under Ben-Dor is a clear champion.

… Ben-Dor has spoken in interviews of the obstacles she encountered – and not just because she is a woman – in becoming a conductor. Perhaps it was the need to overcome a kicking around by adversity, along with an excitable temperament, that made her the conductor she is.

… But she knows what she wants, and she gets results. Among other things, she has the gift – perhaps it is something she learned from Leonard Bernstein during her 1985 Tanglewood summer – of getting an orchestra revved up, not beating time for a few measures, and sending the music spinning off into orbit on its own.

A lifetime’s work ahead
January, 1999

Alberto Ginastera
Panambí – Ballet – World Premiere Recording

There are many causes you might (rather lazily) expect a woman conductor to champion. Especially when she happens to be Gisèle Ben-Dor and has in the past described conducting as ‘macho, strong-willed and stubborn … not always an elegant profession.’ But assume that such an opinion obliges her to adopt a pulpit-thumping stance of a certain political hue on the podium and you would be wrong. The sexual politics of conducting in a male-dominated world is an issue the one-time Bernstein protégé deals with in an unconfrontational manner. There is, she insists, ‘no difference in substance between conductors, just a difference in style, irrespective of their gender.’ Much more important to this effusive, sharp-witted, passionate and witty woman is the music she conducts and in particular the neglected repertoire of her native Latin America. ‘It is my pleasure and my mission to play this music,’ she declares, ‘and I’m intending to explore the repertoire with every possible venue and label that I have.’

Currently Music Director of the Santa Barbara Symphony and the Boston Pro Arte Chamber Orchestras, the Montevideo-born Ben-Dor’s commitment to Latin American music on disc began in 1995 with a well-received Ginastera recording on Koch International with the London Symphony Orchestra and Israel Chamber Orchestra (12/96). This month she is reunited with the LSO for the first volume in a new series on BMG Conifer devoted to important twentieth-century Latin American composers which again features the music of the Argentinian Alberto Ginastera (1916-83). Simultaneously from Koch come world premiere recordings of two works by her Uruguayan compatriot, Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940), a composer currently enjoying an increasingly high profile in Ben-Dor’s adopted American home.

‘He was an extraordinary, deeply feeling, loving, compassionate, caring human being and his music reflects that. It’s quite wild, and with so much charm, so much humour.’ But there is pain and tragedy too in the alcohol-dependent suicide’s music, not least in the heartbreaking saxophone solo of Itinerarios , a lament for Civil War-wracked Spain. ‘The whole movement is disjointed, almost like Picasso’s Guernica , and then suddenly you have this perfect melody: sweet, symmetrical, organized, beautiful.

Such sudden contrasts, says Ben-Dor, are wholly characteristic of Revueltas’s music. ‘ Colorines’ seems like something very superficial and then come postcards of colours and suddenly, in the interlude for winds, a melody from heaven. That contrast: don’t you hear that in Mahler too?’ Other influences are to be found too, not least Stravinsky, ‘but the jagged rhythms, the sudden outbursts and intrusion of folkloric elements is pure Revueltas. And how good it is!’

Refusing to shy away from acknowledging the influences operating on Latin American composers early this century – ‘Of course Ginastera studied de Falla and Ravel and Bartok, but who didn’t at the time? Who wasn’t influenced by them?’ – Ben-Dor regards such references as wholly complementary. In Ginastera’s Op. 1 ballet, Panambi , ‘the language is so earthy, so sensuous, so Ravellian that it explodes with colour and rhythm’ while the later ‘boy-meets-girl story’, Estancia , she compares to Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances in its use of folk idioms, and finds there another, perhaps surprising echo. ‘The fugue in “Los puebleros” reminds you of Richard Strauss. It’s so witty, all those spikey, chattering rhythms make it sound like you’re listening to musical gossip.’

What binds Ginastera and Revueltas together, however, is something less tangible, something, says Ben-Dor, that needs to be felt rather than described. ‘A lot of the music has to do with the pride and energy of a people who live on and work with the land. The Pampas is a vast, lonely, quiet, isolated place and every time you find people alone with nature there is going to be something of a spiritual awakening. Beethoven could tell us that too!’

Though future releases and potential repertoire have yet to be mapped out – ‘Doing this is not without great effort; each of these recordings is a labour of love’ – Ginastera seems set to loom large over Ben-Dor’s BMG Conifer series with the second volume, due for release later this year, likely to feature his music. The choice after that, she claims excitedly, is an embarrassment of riches. ‘Do you know how much beautiful music there is in Latin America waiting to be discovered? More than even I will be able to cover!’

Classical CD Review
By Len Mullenger

Another exuberant recording from Gisèle Ben-Dor (see Ginastera last month). Of the two works on this disc two are première recordings; La Coronela and Colorines.

Many hands have been at work on La Coronela (The Lady Colonel). This four-movement suite is taken from a ballet written for the choreographer Waldeen, inspired by a series of engravings by the Mexican José Guadalupe Posada, reproduced here from the CD booklet. This also contains excellent notes by Ken Smith on these little known compositions.

The ballet La Coronela was first performed in 1940. It depicts the rise of the working class and the overthrow of the Gentry. It also depicts, so clearly, that the peasant working class finds its amusement in taverns and in dancing as the ballet can often sound like a huge fun-filled, inebriate party. If we consider the Ballet Suite to be in four “acts” briefly separated from each other, the “scenes” within each act run continuously although the transition is often abrupt.

The opening movement is Los Privilegiados (Society Ladies of Those Times : The uppercrust of 1900) and this is in three episodes: Las Tres Damitas (The Three Young Ladies), La Levita y el Sorbete (The Israelite Charity Lady and the Gentleman), El Espejo (The Mirror). However, we are not given any details of the scenario to fill in the details. Revueltas is setting out his stall, depicting the carefree and uncaring life led by the decadent bourgeoisie. The music of this suite is like a chameleon, constantly changing shape, colour, metre — one minute a mexican rhythm, next an old fashioned waltz, with huge doses of Stravinsky thrown in and underpinned by a thwacking bass drum! It is played with tremendous gusto and enthusiasm by the Santa Barbara Symphony of whom Ms Ben-Dor is Music Director.

The Three Young Ladies stride in with a gruff rhythmic introduction heavy with bass and low brass. The trumpet is one of the key figure in La Coronela and now introduces itself with a short fanfare. A chirpy cor-anglais, oboe and bassoon take up a flouncing, tocking rhythm reminiscent of the opening to Peter and the Wolf, interrupted by a stabbing three-note motive on the trumpet followed by a comment from the bass drum (another major character in this piece). Violins introduce a slightly quicker pace until the trumpet takes up the theme and rhythm, driving it forward to a sudden doubling of the tempo – but only briefly. After four declamatory chords we are back to the original flouncing, tocking tempo, this time with the horns carrying the melody until, one again, the trumpet takes over.

We move straight into The Israelite Charity Lady and the Gentleman with a new bluesy phrase with jazz clarinet glissando. With a sudden acceleration we are in Rite of Spring territory: pounding strings and stabbing, chattering and slurring brass. Just as quickly we revert to the bluesy episode on woodwind and then hesitant strings lead to a new idea for The Mirror. This is full of portent with an insistent drum, slow strings and horns before all this is overthrown and we go racing away with the Peter and the Wolf episode again. All this in just five minutes!

The second movement shows the other side of the peso, a plaintive threnody for the dispossessed and the subjugated: Los Desheredados (The Disinherited), El Peón (The Labourer), Los Rurales (The Rural Resistance). We experience the repression of the disinherited with tuba over pounding piano and drum, long held notes on trombones and trumpet, piercing, piping, lamenting woodwind with a gradual fortissimo to cymbals and gong. This is like an episode from a Shostakovich symphony. The intensity grows with The Labourer. Strings have a short passage of agitation and despair, taken up by stabbing trumpet in Rite of Spring mode again. Finally gong and cymbal introduce The Rural Resistance. A hesitant pecking rhythm with Petrushka trumpet followed by return to the agitated strings, a brisk march idea and gradually the episode marches into the distance.

The third movement is Don Ferruco’s Nightmare (La Pesadilla de Don Ferruco): El Ambigú (The Party), El Peladito y la Gatita (The Scoundrel and the Simple Girl), La Burguesita (The Middle Class Lady), La Coronela (The eponymous Lady Colonel). The Party is a parody of a waltz with jangling piano. The rhythms are slurred; if you know La Valse by Ravel you will recognize the style. Then straight into a Mexican peasant dance for the Scoundrel and the Simple Girl. The Middle Class Lady wants none of that and has an elegant little dance for strings and woodwind with no brass or percussion. The Lady Colonel is introduced by a loud fanfare followed by a cocky rhythmic piano and full orchestra with the usual strident trumpet. She is upper class but likes to slum it so her dance alternates between elegance and local Mexican rhythm – driving without a break, into part IV.

This final movement depicts the Last judgment (El Juicio Final): La Lucha (The Battle), Los Caídos (The Fallen) and Los Liberados (The Liberated). There is violence in The Battle; trumpets and drums leading the charge to a glorious, celebratory passage of victory full of local mexican colour. Those fallen in battle are honoured with an 8 minute epicedium with mournful horns, the trumpet sounding the Last Post and a brief Danse Macabre from a solo violin. Following all the noise and colour that has gone before this is a most affecting passage. But the liberated peasants are in celebratory mood and the ballet suite ends with a swinging inebriated party on the original Lady Colonel theme.

Revueltas’s “alternative” life style led to his early death from bronchial pneumonia and he was working on the ballet when he died, so it remained unfinished. The score was completed through the collaboration of the composer Blas Galindo with the orchestration of Candelario Huízar. Thus, the first performance took place as scheduled, conducted by Eduardo Hernández Moncada. This completed score was then lost and had to be reconstructed by the conductor José Limantour with the orchestration completed by Moncada. For the reconstruction Limantour used two Revueltas film scores; ¡Vamanos con Pancho Villa¡ (1935) and Los de abajo (1939) but enlarging them on the basis that with a full symphony orchestra he did not need to suffer the same constraints that occur in a film score recording. So, the authenticity of the ending of the suite is subject to debate.

Itinerarios (Caminos) (Travel Diary) (1938) lasts just over 9 minutes and is a powerful and solemn lament. The strings are more prominent than hitherto but the trumpet is just as dominant. Dissolution and disillusionment abound. There is an important part for an introspective soprano saxophone. Ben-Dor says in her Gramophone interview with Michael Quinn (Jan 99) “He was an extraordinary, deeply feeling, loving, compassionate, caring human being and his music reflects that. It’s quite wild, and with so much charm, so much humour. But there is pain and tragedy too in the alcohol-dependent suicide’s music, not least in the heartbreaking saxophone solo of Itinerarios, a lament for Civil War-wracked Spain. The whole movement is disjointed, almost like Picasso’s Guernica, and then suddenly you have this perfect melody: sweet, symmetrical, organized, beautiful.”

For Colorines [7.18], the Santa Barbara Orchestra is replaced by the English Chamber Orchestra in a fuller acoustic (full personnel of both orchestras are listed in the booklet). This is an earlier work (1932) in a more neo-classical style but again making complex rhythm the most important element rather than thematic development. The influence of Petrushka is again much in evidence although there is plenty of time for pensive reflection as well as celebration.

Music of stunning vitality and highly recommended.

Revealing A Lot About Revueltas
By Mark Swed

“To head in the direction of downtown Santa Barbara for musical revelations about the 20th century is something new. But it is to Santa Barbara one goes these days to find out about some of the more astonishing aspects of Latin American music of the past century, thanks to the advocacy of the Santa Barbara Symphony’s Uruguayan music director, Gisèle Ben-Dor’. An enterprising conductor, she can be counted upon to unearth something important every season. But this year she has done much more, with a four-day Silvestre Revueltas Music Festival that ended Sunday.”

The festival was a centennial celebration of a great Mexican composer, born on the last day of the 19th century, whose voice has only recently become widely heard. A Grammy-nominated recording of Revueltas’ music by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Esa-Pekka Salonen is helping, but there is still much to learn about this composer who filtered indigenous Mexican musics through a dazzling modernist sensibility.”

Revueltas was a romantic figure who could almost have been invented by Hollywood. A political radical and artist who was part of the same revolutionary culture as Diego Rivera, a fighter in the Republican struggle in Spain against Franco, a manic-depressive and alcoholic, and, as Steven Ledbetter wrote in his fascinating and detailed festival program notes, a “very difficult man to deal with on a social level,” Revueltas produced a blaze of important music in the last nine years of a short life (he died at 40). The “genius under the volcano who was ruined by alcohol” is the memorable phrase of Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus, a Revueltas authority who was on hand for the festival.

Even a brief visit to the festival Sunday for its last two concerts was enough to reveal just how remarkable a figure Revueltas was. Among Revueltas’ great achievements was his film music, although the 10 films he scored are virtually unknown in America. His first, “Redes” (Nets), is a classic, but even that is rarely seen. It was shot in Mexico in 1934 by photographer Paul Strand and co-directed by a young Fred Zinnemann (of “High Noon” fame) and Emilio Gomez Muriel. Revueltas’ score to it is mainly known through a suite made by the great Austrian conductor Erich Kleiber.

For the festival, however, the complete score was restored and performed in accompaniment with a screening of the hour-long film as part of a wildly ambitious Santa Barbara Symphony afternoon program in the Arlington Theater. “Redes,” which has little dialogue, is a stark, haunting documentary-like depiction of the class struggle of Veracruz fishermen. It is a story told in strong images of sea and sky, of greed and suffering. The gripping music of tense sinew, angry but compassionate lyricism, ingratiating fold song undercut by harsh violence, is a crucial element, and its visceral sonic power makes this one of the most compelling experiments in restoring live music with cinema.

It was also Ben-Dor’s intention to place Revueltas within a larger context of major Latin American musical statements, and for the first half of the concert, she retrieved an amazing one, Villa-Lobos’ massive Symphony No. 10 (“Amerindia”). This is the monster of Villa-Lobos’ 11 symphonies, and Ben-Dor’s performance was its U.S. premiere.

“Amerindia” lasts nearly an hour; it requires a huge orchestra, a large chorus and vocal soloists. Written in 1952 for the 400th anniversary of the founding of Sau Paulo, the symphony attempts to grasp four centuries of Brazilian culture and myth through a host of musical styles, and as so often is the case in Villa-Lobos, Afro-Brazilian rhythms cozy up to Bach. There are pages of text in Latin, modern Portuguese and the Tupi dialect. Magical monkey legends here; Marian poems there. The second part of the five-part symphony is a war cry. The last ends with a great, inspiring Alleluia.

It is hard to know what to make of it all. Villa-Lobos’ flair for the dramatic pulls one in, but he doesn’t always work at the same level of inspiration. It was even harder to know what to make of it from this performance. Ben-Dor is an enthusiastic, forceful conductor, but her industry isn’t matched by her resources. The Santa Barbara Symphony, the various choruses and soloists (tenor Carlo Scibelli and bass Nmon Ford Livene) all struggled valiantly. It was also a problem for the audience not to be able to follow the text, printed in tiny type, in a very darkened hall.

Sunday evening, Ben-Dor presented a different sort of context, this time with Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestra playing Revueltas, followed by mostly Latin American percussion music by the Tambucio Percussion Quartet of Mexico, at the Santa Barbara Junior High School Auditorium.

The chamber orchestra proved on even shakier ground than its big brother. Still, one got the point with the US premiere of “Cuauhnahuac” in its string orchestra version. Written in 1931, this is Revueltas’ first major score, and it is an early, mostly successful, attempt to mix cultures, that finds similarities in pre-Hispanic and modernist musics but also has great fun exploiting their jolting differences. Seven years later, in “Troka” and “Musica Para Charlar” (“Chit-Chat Music”), which followed on the program, Revueltas had found a hundred frisky, entertaining and inventive ways to accomplish that.

The Tambuco had less interesting music to play. These percussion pieces were often just extensions of a single notion, tapping on a table or, in Colombian composer Leopoldo Novoa’s “Sabe como e’?” (You Know What I mean?) rasping on guacharacas . But here the virtuosity and theatricality of the players compensated. Put Ben-Dor and her enthusiasms together with players of this caliber and Santa Barbara could really produce a world-class festival.

Neglected Revueltas Gets His Due
By Octavio Roca

Silvestre Revueltas has been called the Mexican Falla but in truth he is very much his own man. True, like Falla in Spain, he absorbed the rhythms of his Hispanic heritage and created sounds that carry logic and dance to their own intricate beat. “La Coronela” was his last work, a ballet that premiered at Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1940 soon after the composer’s death.

This first-ever recording of that score is a winner. The dance episodes, based on a series of drawings of skeleton figures by Jose Guadalupe Posada, create a parade of musical postcards from a society about to unravel: waltzes lead to intricate meters set against each other, outrageous harmonies emerge between steps, a military trumpet eerily calls all to order and a sweet little dance tune returns as if unharmed.

The recording includes other pieces by Revueltas, each worth a listen. And perhaps the biggest revelation here is Gisèle Ben-Dor, a conductor whose passion and intensely personal involvement with this music go a long way to convince listeners not only of the delicious talents of the Santa Barbara Symphony, but also of the immense pleasures of the unjustly neglected Revueltas.

Former Annapolis conductor proves her mastery of Latin American style
‘Colorful’ first recording done of Mexican piece

The recording studio continues to be a hospitable setting for the talents of Gisèle Ben-Dor, whose six-year stint at the helm of the Annapolis Symphony ended in spring 1997.

Ben-Dor, who maintains a bi-coastal career with the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Symphony and the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, began her recording career auspiciously in 1995 with a well-received anthology devoted to the music of Hungarian Bela Bartok issued on the Centaur label.

Her second disc, also released in 1995, was devoted to the works of Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera. With the London Symphony and Israel Chamber Orhcestra in tow, Ben-Dor, Uruguayan by birth, demonstrated her affinity for the Latin style in feisty, expertly colored accounts of Ginastera’s “Glosses on Themes of Pablo Casals” and “Varaciones Concertantes.”

Now come two more additions to the Ben-Dor discography, both worthy entries to the classical catalog, especially for ASO fans wishing to keep tabs on the Annapolis alumna as she ascends the slippery ranks of her profession.

Ben-Dor’s new recording for Koch International, the first-ever of Mexican Silvestre Revueltas’ ballet suite “La Coronella,” reaffirms her mastery of the Latin American idiom.

Ben-Dor’s account is a white-knuckle ride through the score. Her command of the various Mexican idioms infused into the suite sounds plenty authentic to me, with atmosphere and hot-blooded brio lurking around every bend in the score.

Her Santa Barbara Orchestra is impressive in both the ballet and in “Itinerarios,” a 9-minute lament spotlighting the plaintive sounds of a solo saxophone. The Califorania brass are first-rate, and while the strings could be weightier and the solo oboe less nasal, the overwhelming impression is of a talented orchestra playing its collective heart out.

Conductor and new world keep the tango renaissance alive
April 8, 2002

The worldwide tango renaissance peaked a couple years ago, but it still can provide an apt demographic-friendly, if less-than- audacious theme for a South Florida music festival. The New World Symphony wrapped up its weeklong festival, Piazzolla and the Passion of Tango, Saturday night at the Lincoln Theatre, with a lively concert of Argentine music, spotlighting the tango master, Piazzolla. Saturday’s concert gained a bit of additional drama with conductor Robert Spano’s cancellation because of complications following sinus surgery. The substitute maestra was Gisele Ben-Dor, music director of the Santa Barbara Symphony. While it was disappointing that the excellent Spano was forced to bow out, one could hardly wish for a better replacement. The Uruguayan-born Ben-Dor has shown herself an inspired advocate of Latin-American music, with acclaimed recordings of Ginastera and Revueltas to her credit, and the conductor did not disappoint. Ben- Dor proved a vigorous podium figure, eliciting responsive playing from the orchestra and conveying a strong, innate feeling for the dance rhythms and swaying melodies of this Latin music.

Ben-Dor’s experience with Ginastera’s Estancia was clearly evident in the roiling performance of dances from the 1941 ballet. Ben-Dor built the plaintive flute solo of the “Wheat dance” into an impassioned lyricism, yet it was in the syncopated outer movements that she proved most impressive. The percussive section, “The Land Workers” was delivered with high-kicking energy and propulsive force, accents incisively pointed. The dervish final dance “Malambo” was given playing of seismic force and commitment. Ben-Dor maintained astounding clarity and control, clarinet squeals cutting through the massive textures, which made the relentless sonic buildup of brass and percussion even more thrilling.

That roof-raising opener had the unwonted effect of making the rest of the concert seem a bit anticlimactic by comparison. Guitarist Martin Mastik and bandoneon player Daniel Binelli proved richly idiomatic solo protagonists in Piazzolla’s Double Concerto for the two instruments, subtitled “Hommage a Liege.” The concerto may not be the most profound of works, yet it showcases Piazzolla’s melodies superbly, and what melodies they are! Mastik was superb in his atmospheric opening cadenza, yet with just a small string orchestra in support, his guitar was often submerged by the strings and Binelli’s wailing bandoneon.

One of the world’s most celebrated bandoneon players, Binelli obtained a striking range of dynamic nuance and coloring from what would appear an ungrateful solo instrument in both the concerto and Piazzolla’s somewhat less inspired, Punta del Este. In Piazzolla’s Tangazo, Ben-Dor brought out the sultry languor, tango rhythms and quirky humor with fine expressive feeling, letting the orchestra deliver the witty closing diminuendo on its own.

Last Round for string orchestra is a memorial to Piazzolla by his compatriot Osvaldo Golijov, 42. Affectionate yet individual in style, his work manages to make tango elements resonate while gently deconstructing the music with astringent string textures that segue into a more straightforward lyrical lament. Ben-Dor and the New World strings made a fine case for Golijov’s offbeat and stylish hommage.

Symphony’s tribute was just ‘glorious’
Thursday, April 11, 2002

”Glorious” is not a word I use often. But the concert that capped the New World Symphony’s weeklong tribute to Astor Piazzolla and nuevo tango at the Lincoln Theatre Saturday night was glorious. Gisele Ben-Dor, the Uruguayan-American conductor, jumping in for the indisposed Robert Spano, did a terrific job because conducting to her doesn’t seem a ”job,” but rather a calling to perform music exactly as it’s supposed to sound. Ben-Dor, who persists in rescuing ailing conductors (she has also stepped in for Daniele Gatti and Kurt Masur in recent seasons) is intimate with Ginastera’s works, and if not a Piazzolla expert too, she did a fine job of fooling everyone in earshot. One of the great tricks in conducting any music is getting rhythmic inflections and tempos just right, both crucial in Ginastera’s early folkish music like the four dances from Estancias. Ginastera, a Piazzolla teacher, was a sort of Bartok of the Pampas, smelting indigenous Argentine music into dances evoking Land Workers, a Wheat Dance, Cattlemen and the crucial Malambo, a challenge to the virility of the proud gaucho, who stomps his opponent into the ground with foot taps of machine-gun rapidity. If the pace isn’t frenetic, it just isn’t the malambo, and Ben-Dor and the musicians understood that.

The breathless pungency of the piece was tremendous, as was conductor and orchestra’s virtuosic grasp of the syncopated, irregular meters painting the cattlemen and the comparative serenity and lyricism of the Wheat Dance. But the sparks that flew in the Malambo set the tone for the entire concert. The Piazzolla pieces were choice. Daniel Binelli, Piazzolla’s bandoneon partner here in 1989 (at a concert arranged by risk-taker Mary Luft shortly before the master’s crippling stroke), joined Martin Mastik, in the stately Double Concerto for Guitar, Bandaneon and String Orchestra. Piazzolla’s compact sublimation of tango, is introduced by a ruminating guitar, then moves in quiet colloquy between the two instruments, eventually erupting in Piazzolla’s swooping, streaking chromatic harmonies and emphatic signature chords.

Binelli played the Punta del Este Suite, too, with penetrating emotional grasp and the most passionate conviction in phrasing, breathing life into each bar as if he, rather than Piazzolla, wrote it. The suite’s second movement pays tribute to the Bachian chorales once played on the bandoneon, an accordion-like instrument, invented for use in organless churches. There was also evocative hommage to Piazzolla from Osvaldo Golijov, whose Last Round for strings was a darkly pensive paen, and Tangazo, that slowly unfurling, then swirling ”Big Tango” for orchestra came off with stylish brilliance. Still, the highpoint was the deeply nostalgic Adiós Nonino Piazzolla penned on the death of his father, and played with supreme poignancy and rhapsodic tenderness by Binelli.

Conductor shows her mettle with Pro Arte
By Ellen Pfeifer

Music director Gisèle Ben-Dor returned to the podium of the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra for the first time this season on Sunday afternoon and reminded audiences once again that we see far too little of her. Her other orchestras in Annapolis and Santa Barbara, as well as a busy guest conducting schedule keep her from Boston, where her considerable accomplishments are always welcome.

Her program Sunday was highlighted by a performance of the Haydn Symphony No. 104 (“London”), surely one of the most familiar of pieces but performed with such verve, sparkle and spontaneity that it seemed almost newly made. Ben-Dor is not a conductor who looks at music with a skewed or eccentric sensibility, but she comes at a work with an innate sense of its rhythmic life, its internal logic, and its musical drama. The jokes and surprises all come off with perfect timing. A change of harmonies – like the switch from major to minor in the slow movement – immediately colors the atmosphere. The result is a naturalness, an inevitability and a freshness to the performance such as one heard here. The orchestra sounded at its best in this performance, the strings playing with a greater unanimity of intonation than they had all afternoon and the winds, Pro Arte’s greatest asset, bringing home the laurels.