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Con Brio: Conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor blazes a rare path in her life and work
By Ryan Jones

Her father was an accountant, and so Gisèle Ben-Dor assumed she would be an accountant, too. If you were a teenage girl growing up in Uruguay three decades ago, this was how things worked. Careers paths weren’t chosen so much as they were inherited.

Always more suited to Tchaikovsky than taxes, Ben-Dor never did get that economics degree. She became, instead, a musician and a conductor. She lives in the United States now, very much a woman of her time and environment, and she is certain her own children will feel no pressure to follow their mother’s line of work.

Good thing, too. They don’t appear to be interested.

“When my oldest son was about 3 years old, someone asked him, ‘So, you want to be a conductor when you grow up?'” Ben-Dor recalls. “He said, ‘No. That’s for girls.'”

She follows the punch line with a joyful laugh, but there is a point to this anecdote, and Ben-Dor makes sure it is not missed.

“You see? That’s the nature of prejudice. This is what he knows,” she explains. “How can a conductor possibly be a man? He can’t identify with that.”

Her oldest son, Roy, is 16 now, no doubt old enough to understand that the job of leading symphony orchestras is not just for girls, and that his mother is something of a rarity. The musical director for two American orchestras, a sought-after guest conductor, and an acclaimed recording artist, Ben-Dor has fought the archaic tendencies of the classical music world, earning a reputation and a fan base that seem to grow daily.

Settled in Englewood Cliffs, where she lives on a quiet street with her husband Eli and sons Roy and 7-year old Gabriel, Ben-Dor has a home base from which her far-reaching career is maintained. Currently, she stands at the helm of the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Symphony and the Boston Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, and appears regularly with orchestras from around the world.

“I’ve been commuting for seven years,” she says with a grin, “and I’m sick of it.”

Travel, it seems, is in her blood.

Sensing the growing tension in pre-World War II Europe, Ben-Dor’s parents left Poland in the early 1930s and settled in Uruguay. Growing up in the small South American nation, she learned half of the six languages she now speaks and developed an intense love of music. “Obsessed,” she says. “That would be the word.

“When I was 3 years old, I asked my parents to buy me a piano, so they bought me one for my fourth birthday,” she continues. “It was just the greatest joy I could’ve had. I would spend hours there. By the time I was 5, I could play anything.

By 12, she was the musical director at her school, and by 14, she was being paid to conduct. She left Uruguay at 18, following her family roots to Israel, where her musical studies intensified and she eventually married. Seven years later, she arrived in the United States, attending a two-year graduate program at Yale and preparing to jump-start a late-blooming career.

Ben-Dor went back to Tel Aviv for her conducting debut, nine months pregnant with Roy. The young family lived briefly in Dumont, until a job as an assistant conductor in Louisville began a series of moves – first to Kentucky, then to Houston, and finally back to New Jersey. Settled in Bergen County, where Eli worked, Ben-Dor took over the Annapolis Symphony, then accepted jobs in Boston and Santa Barbara.

“If I could find an orchestra within a two-hour drive of here, I would be so happy,” she says. “New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, anywhere.”

She has made her presence felt locally, guesting with the New York Philharmonic on occasion, including a recent appearance during which she stepped in without rehearsal and led the orchestra through a Beethoven overture and a Mahler symphony.

Because of performances like that, and because of the emotional depth of her recorded work – on her most recent, she leads the London Symphony Orchestra through the Alberto Ginastera ballets “Panambi” and “Estancia,” just released on BMG/Conifer – Ben-Dor has been inundated with glowing reviews.

“Critics, there are those who will adore you,” she says, “and those for whome you can do no good.”

The statement applies to any artistic medium, but it carries an extra sting for Ben-Dor, a woman in a decidedly patriarchal field. For all the critics who have raved about her, she remembers those who refused to mention her name. For all the musicians who have praised her ability to bring out the best in them, she remembers those who wouldn’t look her in the eyes.

She remembers them, but she also knows they are in the minority. Mostly, there is acceptance, even appreciation for Ben-Dor’s talent, intelligence, and artistic insight. “There is room for women, but it takes time for some people to realize that,” she says. “It’s not easy. You have to prove it. I realize how long it takes.”

It shouldn’t take too long. Her son had it figured out by the time he was 3 years old.

Orchestrating her next move: Pro Arte’s outgoing conductor is ready for the big leagues
By Ellen Pfeifer

Gisèle Ben-Dor has a big dream. She is the outgoing principal conductor of the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, music director of the Santa Barbara Symphony, and a guest conductor for the New York Philharmonic, Boston Pops, English Chamber Orchestra, Israel Chamber Orchestra and Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. But now she looks forward to the time when she can “play a concert and go home afterward.”

Having helped guide Pro Arte’s fortunes for eight years – she was the first music director engaged after the death of founder Larry Hill – she is poised for a big step into the major leagues.

Tomorrow afternoon at Sanders Theatre, she leads the last of her Pro Arte programs this season. Next year, she will conduct only one concert with the orchestra, although her contract technically runs until the end of the 1999-2000 season. After that, she hints, there are things on the horizon and “lots of opportunities within driving distance” of her home in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.

“The commuting has become harder and harder,” Ben-Dor said during lunch in Cambridge earlier this week. Constant travel has kept her away from home and family more than she would like (she and her husband have sons ages 7 and 16).

Indeed, life has been so hectic that she and her husband have little time to attend to the everyday details of life. “We bought our first bedroom set three years ago,” she said with a laugh. “We’ve been married 19 years and for 16 of those we slept on a mattress on the floor, futon-style.” Similarly, she recently took her younger son along to Santa Barbara to attend one of the children’s concerts she conducts there. “I’d conducted children’s concerts for thousands of kids except mine,” she said.

Although she admits her career until now may have grown slowly, she points to several recent accomplishments that are bringing her more attention and a higher profile. Most recently, there was her last-minute substitution at the New York Philharmonic, the second time she has played pinch hitter for that ensemble.

Called on short notice, she filled in for Daniele Gatti after Ivan Fischer had rehearsed and conducted the first performances of the program. She went on without rehearsal to conduct the Mahler Symphony No. 4 and Beethoven “Coriolan” Overture. Music Director Kurt Masur was in the audience and was so impressed with her performance that he signed her to be his cover during the Philharmonic’s month-long European tour next year.

“Beyond the stunt, it was a fine performance,” Ben-Dor said and James Oestreich of the New York Times agreed. “I did some things differently from the previous conductor and the orchestra was with me 100 percent. They were terrific.” Interestingly, Ben-Dor says such last-minute performances don’t frighten her. “I have no fear,” she said. “I can be more afraid about a rehearsed program when I’m worried I might lose something.”

Substituting is an adventure for her that she takes to like a fish in water.

Another achievement has been the success of her recent recordings featuring Latin-American composers Alberto Ginastera and Silvestre Revueltas. The Uruguay-born Ben-Dor has an affinity for this music as critics have noted in her Koch International and BMG discs. “The recordings are very important to me,” she said. “They are repertory that no one else is doing and I oversee every aspect, from the program notes to the editing, to the packaging.”

As for Pro Arte, Ben-Dor feels she has “achieved some things and not achieved others.” She has found it challenging to work with a cooperative orchestra where the musicians decide almost everything, from the choice of music director to the choice of repertory.

“The orchestra is rich in midlife now,” she said. “It started very young and thinking there were infinite possibilities. As the players grew older and had families to support, they became concerned with playing as many jobs as they could. That has affected many decisions about the orchestra’s life, perhaps most significantly those involving personnel.”

At some concerts she conducted, there were perhaps only five or six Pro Arte regulars playing and she “had to make an orchestra out of that” miscellaneous ensemble. “I couldn’t change that. These players had to take other jobs.”

Another source of frustration was her limited say in what music was performed. “This is not an easy thing for a music director,” she said.

“During the first three years, I didn’t understand the process. Things went from committee to committee. Finally, I just let it go. There was no reason to create friction. So I just lived with it and four years passed.”

Still, she said, “We got along all these years” and what’s more, she feels it was “a joy and honor to be associated with those players.” Apparently the feeling is mutual. When she tried to resign two years ago, the orchestra asked her to stay. She did, but as principal conductor and not music director. “I think I contributed some cohesiveness and high artistic standards when I could call the shots,” she said.

Now, she is looking to the future. “Maybe this is the beginning of the beginning. I feel that I am ready for anything.”

Future of Music: Women Conductors
By Malcolm Hayes

Ben-Dor’s own ascent is well on its way, particularly in America, where she has built a reputation as a conductor whose flair for leading from the front co-exists (for once) with seasoned musicianship to match. Already she has productively held down two music directorships, with the Annapolis Symphony in Maryland (from 1991 to 1997), and with the Santa Barbara Symphony in California (from 1995 until at least 2001). Other positions, with the Houston Symphony and the Boston Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, have underlined her impressive credentials. And these credentials are now beginning to be presented more frequently over here.

There’s Gisèle Ben-Dor’s latest recording with the London Symphony Orchestra, for instance (reviewed by me in Classic CD’s Christmas edition, issue 106). This serves notice that there are much more interesting ways of approaching Alberto Ginastera’s two ballet scores, Panambí and Estancia, than the usual method of tearing through them like a bandmaster on crack – a point made by Ben-Dor’s exemplary mirroring of the music’s balance between tumultuous dynamism and evocative atmospherics.

Talking to her about this project seemed as good a moment as any to bring up the inevitable gender issue. Encouraged by Ben-Dor’s voluble lack of pretension and evidently reliable sense of humor, I mentioned that the LSO, in days of yore at least, used to regard itself with pride as the most uncompromisingly macho orchestra on the planet. Sure enough, she rocked with laughter at the appropriateness of the encounter, while insisting (convincingly) that whenever she raised her baton before the assembled LSO players, their professionalism was exemplary.

“I know it sounds like an obvious thing to say, but I really don’t think being a woman is a problem once you’ve got to the point of standing up before an orchestra and working with them. The problem is much more how you get there in the first place. But then that, too, is the same for every conductor. Assuming that you have the talent and the energy, so much still comes down to whom you happen to know and where you happen to be. In other words, it’s down to luck.”

For all that, does she feel that an orchestra reacts differently to a female or male conductor with notionally equal ability? “Orchestras have collective mentalities. Either you and they get on, or you don’t. Yes, there have been individuals in the orchestras that I’ve worked with – sometimes extremely talented players – who will always have a problem taking instructions of any kind from a woman. But it doesn’t happen often. When it does, you just try to keep the temperature as level as you can.

“On the whole I’ve found that players are more interested in finding out what I have to offer as a musician. I’m sorry if that doesn’t sound exciting enough, but that’s just how it is! Working with the Boston Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra was especially rewarding in that respect, because they’re self-governing – they choose their conductors themselves, and so you know they really want you to be there. Now, however, I’ve reached the stage in my career where I’d rather be taking more of the decisions myself.”

Gisèle Ben-Dor was born in Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay, into a Jewish family that had emigrated there from Poland before the Second World War. “They were all musical people,” she says, “although none were musicians professionally. My father was an accountant. But he encouraged me from the very start to make a life in music if that was what I believed in. I was raised to have such confidence. Especially from the intellectual point of view. My father was really my first feminist.”

Her early years encompassed the unorthodox first stages of her musical training, and led to her counducting an assortment of local school choirs and orchestras at the veteran age of 12. “I know it sounds absurd,” she says, “but I really didn’t see anything strange about it. It just happened.” At about this time she was taken to her first classical concert, where the gestures of the conductor on the podium before the orchestra struck her as somewhat strange. (“I thought he was a madman. I couldn’t see any connection between what he was doing there and what I was doing at school.”)

During her teenage years, as with hordes of her contemporaries, her guitar was her best musical friend. It might have remained so if, at the age of 17, Ben-Dor hadn’t suddenly found herself pitched into a different cultural world. “The political situation in Uruguay had become very difficult, so my parents decided to take us all to live in Israel. I enrolled at the Rubin Academy in Tel Aviv, where I studied with Enrique Barenboim, the father of Daniel. Things went on from there.”

She met her future husband, Eli Ben-Dor, an engineer with whom she now lives, at their home in New Jersey. She then won a place to study conducting at Yale Music School, and immediately after graduating made her debut with the Israel Philharmonic, standing in at ultra-short notice for an unwell Kurt Masur – an occasion that has gone into local legend, thanks to Ben-Dor being nine months pregnant at the time with the first of her two children. But for all her cosmopolitan upbringing and North American-based career, her Latin American roots are important to her.

“One reason I feel close to the music of Ginastera, for instance, is that I’m from Uruguay – Argentina and Uruguay are on opposite sides of the River Plate, but they share exactly the same culture. Also I feel that Ginastera has been much misunderstood. He is famous for his folk-influenced music – the suite of dances from Estancia, for instance. So there’s this feeling that all the rest of his music ought to be like that too. And of course it isn’t. The style of many of his later works is much more advanced. Some of them even use serial procedures.

“He was really several different composers rolled in one,” she says. “I think he came to feel that South American music depended so much on the folk-music tradition behind it that it risked becoming a backwater, and he wanted to take a more universal approach. From this point of view he is like Copland, whose music also passed through several different styles. In painting and sculpture, this is true also of Picasso, whose whole life was a statement that there are always different ways of doing things.”

So why does Latin American music in general, and Ginastera’s in particular, continue not to be taken as seriously as it deserves to be? Gisèle Ben-Dor’s views are forthright: “I think it’s political,” she says. “There is still this enormous North-South divide, and it comes out in ideas about musical repertory too. Latin America has produced magnificent composers besides Ginastera and Villa-Lobos. But Chavez is still not so well known outside his native Mexico. And Revueltas even less. Recently I was able to record three works of Revueltas on Koch International Classics, and two of them, La Coronela and Colorines, had never been recorded before. You should hear them. This music is just remarkable.” (I since have, and it is.)

“Revueltas’s centenary falls on December 31 this year,” continues Ben-Dor, “the day before the new millennium. And yet he still isn’t on the international map. There is this simplistic view of Spanish and Latin American music – that it’s capable of a folk idiom in the concert hall, and Zarzuela in the theatre, and that’s it. As a conductor I have needed to build a wide repertory, and that’s as it should be. But I’m also too deteremined to work for music like Revueltas’s whenever I can.

For all of Ben-Dor’s feisty optimism, plus resources of artistry, stamina and determination that are clearly as unquenched as the day she started out, it has been a long haul for this gifted musician. It’s fortunate that she believes in life and living everyday life to the full as well.

“No-one likes being unemployed too often. I’ve been in work steadily now for the past 10 years, but I wasn’t before then. There were quite long periods when not much was happening. It’s true that many young conductors who find success early seem to suffer from over-exposure. In that respect I was lucky, my career developed slowly for a quite a long time.

“I had time to learn, and to reflect. Also I had started a family by then. So the last thing I would want to say would be that all those years were not time well spent. Equally, I’m not saying that I would have chosen not to be in work! It isn’t an easy profession. But who said it was meant to be? You just have to be very, very persistent.”

Revueltas’ Modernist Vision Spices Up the Latin Quarter
By Bradley Bambarger

LA VIDA LOCA: With Latin music getting its day in the sun, it’s nice that we have something to celebrate besides Ricky Martin. Particularly, there is Silvestre Revueltas, the greatest of Mexican composers, whose crazy, creative life began on Dec. 31, 1899. Revueltas is in many ways the musical analog to iconic muralist Diego Rivera; his modernist art divines the spirits of Mexican folklore to forge an original and vibrant vision, one simultaneously earthy and surreal in true Day of the Dead manner. Although steamy and colorful, Revueltas’ primal mosaics are far from pictured-postcard romanticism, convulsing as they do with what he described as the “rhythm of life.”

Along with his hallucinatory music, the hazy historical record has helped to reincarnate Revueltas as a mythic character. The ephemeral details of his life have been woven into legend, heightened by an early, dissolute end. Brought up in Mexico’s rural Durango province, Revueltas learned the violin at a young age. He went on to study in Chicago and lead a theater orchestra in San Antonio before joining nationalist composer Carlos Chavez in introducing contemporary music to Mexico City in the ’20s. Filled with revolutionary fervor, he also spent time fighting fascism in Spain. The last years of his life were fraught with troubles, and Revueltas suffered an alcoholic’s death in 1940.

In the preceding decade, though, Revueltas had been prolific, writing intense theatrical scores and such concert masterpieces as “Sensemayá,” a percussive, ritualistic work that sounds like Stravinsky after swallowing a tequila-soaked worm. “Sensemayá” went on to win favor as an orchestra showpiece – and as a feature on disc from Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic recording in 1963 (Sony Classical) to more recent Latin samplers by Michael Tilson Thomas and his New World Symphony (Argo) and Enrique Batiz and the Festival Orchestra Of Mexico (Naxos). The world has been slow to catch up to the rest of Revueltas’ Peer Music catalog, although the stage was set for the centennial with pioneering sets issued in the mid-’90s: “Night Of The Mayas,” a historic compilation on Catalys/BMG; “Musica De Feria,” a New Albion disc of the four string quartets played by the excellent Cuarteto Latinoamericano; and a Dorian album featuring the volcanic film score “Redes” as rendered by the late Eduardo Mata and the Simón Bolivar Symphony.

That’s not to mention a sharply played and beautifully recorded album issued this spring by Sony. Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in “Sensemayá,” “Ventanas,” and the suite from the film score “La Noche De Los Mayas,” and he directs the Philharmonic’s New Music Group in “Homenaje A Federico García Lorca,” “Ocho Por Radio,” and two “Little Serious Pieces.” The Los Angeles band will perform the kaleidoscopic “La Noche De Los Mayas” at the Hollywood Bowl in August, as well as on tour in Mexico.

But the current leader in the recognition of Revueltas is the Uruguayan-born American conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor. She is in the last year of a decade-long tenure as director of Boston’s Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, a group that has made a name for itself with fresh repertoire. And as music director of the Santa Barbara Symphony for the past four years, she has revitalized the California band (and its audience), specifically by incorporating Hispanic music. One of the highlights of last year was Ben-Dor’s disc of Revueltas rarities with Santa Barbara on Koch, the orchestra’s debut recording. The album features a premiere take on Revueltas’ final work, the richly melodic ballet “La Coronela,” as well as the trippy, expressionistic “Itinerios” and more typically folkloric “Calorimes.”

In October, Ben-Dor leads the Camerata De Las Americas in a Revueltas program in Mexico City. And following up her earlier staging of “La Coronela,” she is planning an ambitious Revueltas festival for next season in Santa Barbara that will not only feature the major orchestral works but the long-unseen films that he scored and concerts of his chamber pieces and children’s music. Ben-Dor admits that it took some talking to get Santa Barbara to open its ears to an obscure Latin American modern. But she is a persuasive advocate.

“I’ve always believed that some of the best classical music comes from folk roots,” Ben-Dor says. “Beethoven, Bartók, De Falla – they were all inspired by the music of their countries. Revueltas is often called the Mexican De Falla, and you can hear Mexico in him as you can hear Spain in De Falla. And that is why once people get a chance to hear a Revueltas piece, they love it. Whether it happens to be violent or satiric or lyrical, the audience hears something they recognize, something they can grab on to. His music communicates immediately. People in Santa Barbara are still talking about the times we played ‘La Noche De Los Mayas.'”

Beyond Revueltas, Ben-Dor has also programmed the works of Piazzolla, Villa-Lobos, and Ginastera in Santa Barbara. Koch issued her first Ginastera album in ’95, and she has followed up on Conifer/BMG with a Ginastera disc with the London Symphony Orchestra that features the ballets “Panambí” and “Estancia,” the latter appearing complete for the first time. For her next Conifer recording, she plans to essay rarely heard Villa-Lobos with Santa Barbara. Ben-Dor has also been the prime mover behind building a living repertoire of Hispanic concert music; the Santa Barbara Symphony has commissioned works by Americans Robert Rodriguez and Miguel d’Aguila.

Yet Ben-Dor is more than just a Latin specialist. More than once, she has filled in at the last minute with the New York Philharmonic – most recently conducting the Mahler Fourth without rehearsal and to rave reviews. (Impressed, music director Kurt Masur has tapped her as his backup on the Philharmonic’s summer 2000 tour of Europe.) But with her South American background and world-class experience, Ben-Dor does feel that she can make a case for Latin American composers that has gone long unmade.

“There has obviously been a political prejudice against classical music from the Third World,” Ben-Dor says. “And with the countries often just struggling to survive, culture didn’t have a chance to get out. It is true even with Spain. Italian opera is famous around the world, but Spanish Zarzuela is hardly known – and there are zarzuela masterpieces to rival those of Italian opera. Also, conductors tend to champion their own music, and Latin America has produced very few conductors. I know that if I had not left Uruguay to study in Tel Aviv and America, I would not be doing what I am now.”

With invitations to conduct Revueltas in Italy and Ginastera in Finland and Switzerland, Ben-Dor is chasing her passions around the world from her family base in New Jersey. She has an upcoming concert in Mexico City with a program devoted to female composers, including Clara Schumann, the unsung Vita Kapralova (a Czech who, if she hadn’t died young in World War II, “would’ve been another Janacek,” Ben-Dor says) and Teresa Carreno (a 19th-century Venezuelan, whose String Quartet Ben-Dor has transcribed for chamber orchestra). Ben-Dor’s wish list includes a recording dedicated to Uruguayan composers. “We have to balance the old favorites with the new and unusual,” she says. “And I believe you can capture people’s imaginations with anything that is done well and with conviction. As Mendelssohn did for Bach and Bernstein for Mahler, you must champion what you believe in.”

Ben-Dor Plans ‘Amerindia’ Recording
By Louinn Lota

Gisèle Ben-Dor is tired of reporters asking, “Is that chiffon?”

“People still care about my dress, my hair, my scarf. … Nobody asks questions about what men wear. Ridiculous,” said Ben-Dor, maestra and music director for the Santa Barbara Symphony.

Ben-Dor is one of four women in the United States who conduct symphony orchestras. But it’s more than her sex that has gained Ben-Dor prominence in her field.

In 1997, Ben-Dor recorded the works of Silvestre Revueltas, one of Mexico’s most prestigious composers, and in January, orchestrated the first recording of “Amerindia” from Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. That recording, her second commercial album with the Santa Barbara Symphony, will be released this spring.

Despite her accomplishments, Ben-Dor said most interviewers focus not on her work but on how she balances career and family.

“I wanted to talk about so much richness and beauty created by these relatively unknown and unrecognized composers with the reputation of being from the so-called Third World,” she said after a recent TV interview. “How I look for composers who have created, in their musical language, the essence of their people, but through pure historical, political, economical facts, they have been ignored.”

However, Ben-Dor does manage to keep a sense of humor about the attention she gets as a woman conductor.

She tells a favorite story about when her oldest son was 2 1/2 and had traveled with her to concerts around the world. “A reporter asked, ‘When you grow up, you’re going to be a conductor, right?’ And my son says, ‘No, yuck. That’s for girls!'”

Born Gisèle Buka in Montevideo, Uruguay, Ben-Dor played piano as a child and remembers bullying her friends to play arrangements her way.

“I told them, ‘You do this. You’re out of tune.’ Friends of mine gave up when I showed my will and power,” she said, laughing. “I grew up knowing I was a conductor. If it didn’t exist, I would think I had discovered it.”

Her father, an accountant, was stunned by her career choice. But by 14, she was being paid to arrange music.

She won a full scholarship to the Yale School of Music, where she received a master’s degree in orchestra conducting in 1982.

The next year, when she was nine months pregnant, she made her conducting debut with the Israel Philharmonic in Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”

“My first child and my first concert,” said Ben-Dor, who is married with two sons. “The orchestra was 110 strong and probably remembers the piece as ‘The Rite of Offspring.’ My son was born two weeks later.

“I had so much poise. I felt so strong, so secure. I still believe it was the best performance of my life.”

Since then, she has worked with the Boston Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Phoenix Symphony, among others. She debuted with the New York Philharmonic in 1994, stepping in for an ailing Kurt Masur. She took the podium without a rehearsal, a score or a baton.

Ben-Dor, who speaks Spanish, English, French, Italian, German and Hebrew, also has worked with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra.

She has recorded the works of Argentina’s Alberto Ginastera with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Israel Chamber Orchestra.

“I’m not saying Ginastera is as good as Beethoven, but they can share in the same company,” she said.

Ben-Dor said she has the satisfaction of bringing composers like Ginastera “to the fore and making an impression on people that classical music is no about old, dead white men in powdered wigs. Their time is coming.”

Women step up to the conductor’s podium
By Gloria Billiard

“I always had this conviction that this is what I was supposed to be doing, and that it was OK for me to do this. And I think for a woman, this is very important.”

So says Gisèle Ben-Dor, music director and conductor of the Santa Barbara Symphony. A mother of two and protégé of Leonard Bernstein, the Uruguay-born musician has held her position for five years.

She’s one of a handful of women in a business traditionally dominated by prominent men. You’ve heard of Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, Andre Previn, Robert Shaw.

Do you know Sarah Caldwell, the first women to conduct for New York’s Metropolitan Opera? That was a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata” in 1976.

How about Iona Brown, of the Chamber Orchestra of Los Angeles? Prior to her direction of that company, she was director of that company, she was director of London’s acclaimed Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Along with Ben-Dor, they’re part of a not-so-quiet revolution in certain opera houses and concert halls. There, women are turning their backs on tradition – and the audience – and taking up the baton.

“I like to tell them what to do, which is very arrogant when you say it,” Ben-Dor says.

For those who have wielded a pencil or other makeshift baton to a recorded piece of music, it may look easy to wave the real thing in front of a group of professional musicians. The music is the music, after all, and the musicians have all played it before. But beware taking the conductor for granted, Ben-Dor says – “(You) stand in front of a live group and try to do it, and see what comes out of the orchestra.”

Her success at getting “what comes out” to sound good is supported by the guest-conducting spots she’s held: the London Symphony, the Boston Pops, the Israel Chamber Orchestra are all on her résumé.

She’s also in demand as a recording conductor, with a contract with BMG/Conifer for several new discs.

When she walks onto the stage, Ben-Dor says, “I feel everything is right with the world. … When I am on the podium, I think I try to become the music, become the actual music.”

It may not be a common profession for a woman. But, “there’s no reason it shouldn’t be,” says the married mother of two, with a laugh.

“Actually, for a married woman with children, I recommend it.”

Winning an ‘A’ for Conduct
Symphony Magazine

On one day’s notice, and with no chance to rehearse the orchestra, Gisèle Ben-Dor stepped to the podium of the New York Philharmonic on December 7 to replace the flu-smitten Kurt Masur. Music director of the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston and the Annapolis Symphony, Ben-Dor made her unscheduled Philharmonic debut with Brahms’s Tragic Overture and Violin Concert (conducted without score or baton) and close with Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony . Unlike the famous substitution of Leonard Bernstein for Bruno Walter on November 14, 1943 – now the stuff of legend – Ben-Dor’s performance was unheralded by the New York press, which was not there to review a program that had been played three times before. The concert was, however, greeted with a standing ovation from the capacity crowd at Avery Fisher Hall.

A Taste of Latin Discoveries Down South
By Gisèle Ben-Dor

As music director of the Santa Barbara Symphony I’m constantly commissioning new works from composers who were born in the United States or who live and work here. I’m an American citizen who’s been here for 20 years, and my two sons are growing up here. But I also began promoting the cause of Latin American composers many years ago, realizing that I could usefully devote my resources with authority to a largely unexplored area that I feel very strongly about. And working in a city that’s about 50 percent Hispanic I have found my own background to be particularly relevant.

I was born to Polish parents, raised in Uruguay, and educated further in Israel so my own background is quite rich and cosmopolitan. But growing up in South America I was exposed to all kinds of Latin music-bossa nova, samba, carnavalitos from the Andes, Argentina, Uruguay. The tango, the malambo. Caribbean music with its cha-cha-chas and merengues and salsas.I’m a classically trained pianist and self-taught guitarist who learned the folk music of Latin America by hearing it and playing it and singing it in my Spanish mother tongue as well as in Brazilian Portuguese.And I’m drawn to composers who borrowed from this music, just as Dvorak, Sibelius, and Smetana did with the folk music of their countries. I’m also trying to give symphony audiences music they haven’t heard before-by programming composers such as Mexico’s Silvestre Revueltas, Argentina’s Alberto Ginastera and Astor Piazzolla, and Brazil’s Heitor Villa-Lobos.

Revueltas, born on the last day of 1899, was the subject of a centennial tribute by the Santa Barbara Symphony in January of this year. Our four-day festival included the chamber orchestra version of Sensemaya and a large number of other orchestral and chamber works by Revueltas, some of them U .S. premieres; an exhibition of manuscripts, photos and scores; lectures by Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus, a Revueltas scholar from the University of Mexico; a family concert with bilingual narration in a mostly Mexican neighborhood, where the orchestra was joined by the Mexican EspiraI puppet theater and a wonderful Mexican percussion ensemble called Tambuco; a screening of three of the ten films for which Revueltas scored music; and the U .S. premiere of the magnificent Symphony No.10 (” Amerindia”) by Villa-Lobos, one of several Latin composers I included in the festival to give context to the music of Revueltas. We were able to take a nucleus of existing activity-subscription and family concerts, pre-concert activities, past performances of Revueltas’s music-and add chamber music, film screenings, and an exhibition. exhausting as it was, I would gladly do it all over again.

The films were made in the 1930s but are still in good condition. We had English subtitles prepared, and I chose to screen one of the films, Redes (“Nets”), with live accompaniment by the orchestra. Redes is a tragic story about poor fishermen in turn-of-the-century Mexico who try to form a union. It has a very visceral impact, with beautiful camera work by Paul Strand and strong music that evokes images from the fishing village, such as the rowing of the boats. The film works extremely well with live accompaniment, because there’s almost no overlap between the dialogue and the music. (This is not the case with Vamonos Con Pancho Villa and La noche de los Mayas, which we screened without live accompaniment to give a taste of Revueltas’s other film music.) All but about ten bars of the music from Redes was removed from the soundtrack, and we used a score that I put together from the published suite and additional music that’s heard in the original film. So now Redes could be done with live accompaniment by any orchestra.

The Santa Barbara audience’s first taste of Revueltas had come in the 1997-98 season with Sensemaya. For the 1998-99 season-a year before our Revueltas festival-I had the orchestra accompany the Santa Barbara State Street Ballet in La Coronela, which tells the story of oppression and liberation in Mexico in the early years of this century. The music was completed by others after Revueltas’s death, but the score used in the 1940 premiere disappeared and had to be reconstructed by conductor Jose Limantour and composer Eduardo Hernandez Moncada. Our performance (which also included Revueltas’s Itinerarias and was subsequently recorded) was the first time the reconstructed ballet had been done since its premiere in 1942. I followed up La Coronela with La Noche de las Mayas. These four works helped prepare our audience for the Revueltas festival the following season.

In the book “Silvestre Revueltas por el mismo” (best translated as “Silvestre Revueltas, in his own words) I discovered an extraordinary personality, deeply touching both in its radiant, life-embracing moments and in its melancholy and despair. At the time of his early death (at 41) he was still writing music with a very strong Mexican influence. Ken Smith writes in his notes for our recording of La Coronela that “for Revueltas, whose teenage years were spent in the throes of the Mexican Revolution, music was about establishing national identity. . .Shutting the door on the old cultural models was, by extension, a rejection of colonial society; his musical ‘vulgarity’ an embrace of the people.” La Coronela begins with a musical depiction of upper-crust Mexican society around 1900. In the middle of the story we have La Coronela-The Lady Colonel, like the woman with the torch in the French Revolution and the ballet ends with battle music, a long elegy for Los Caidos (The Fallen), and a jubilant salute to Los Liberados (The Liberated).

Much of Revueltas’s music has the kind of brash, rhythmically propulsive character commonly associated with Latin-American culture. But a much more introspective style can also be heard in his music, as it can be in the music of Ginastera (1916-83), an Argentinean who was influenced not only by the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla but by Stravinsky, Bartok, and the French Impressionists. Ginastera’s music had three clear periods. The early ballets Panambi, based on a Guarani Indian legend of love and magic, and Estancia (“The Ranch”), could be termed “objective nationalism.” Estancia ends with a fiery malambo, the typical dance of the gauchos, but also has many lyrical moments reflecting life on the Argentinean Pampa. I’ve seen these vast grasslands and traveled through them. It’s a lonely existence, and this comes out in the words of Martin Fierro, Jose Hernandez’s epic poem of 1873-which we had to memorize as students, and which Ginastera uses in parts of Estancia. When I conducted the complete ballet with the Santa Barbara Symphony in 1997 the narration and singing were in Spanish. I would always want the singer/narrator to be an Argentinean or Uruguayan (or pretend to be one, just as singers perfect their diction in Italian, French, German, Viennese dialects, etc.). I couldn’t hear it any other way.

In his middle period Ginastera uses language that’s more indirectly nationalistic, as in Bartok-inspired by, but not imitative of, folk music. Works include Glosses an Themes of Pablo Casals and Variaciones concertantes, which I included in my first Ginastera CD. And there’s the final period, which I’m working on now as I conduct and record his 1971 opera Beatrix Cenci in its European premiere in Geneva and his long-neglected Turbae ad Passionem Gregorianam in Madrid. Beatrix Cenci is dodecaphonic, aleatoric, ferociously expressionistic, experimental, and uncompromising, with no trace of folk music. It makes one think of multi-faceted artists like Copland (with whom Ginastera studied at Tanglewood) and Stravinsky and Picasso. Ultimately, Ginastera wanted to be seen as a universal musician, not solely as an Argentinean composer.

Wherever I conduct I try to do some music by Latin-American composers, but always alongside more standard repertoire. Rebellious and/ or original as some of them may have been, these composers fully belong in the cultural tradition of the West, no less than Mahler or Ravel. They learned their craft by being exposed to the great standard composers. In trying to bring out music that hasn’t been heard I hope audiences will understand this. The “third-world” countries of Latin America haven’t had the political muscle to push their culture in other countries-they’ve had so many other needs. I want to show that there is wonderful music here to be discovered.

It’s not a question of whether this music is as great as Beethoven or Brahms. We sometimes pay respect to European composers just because of one or two works that have found a place in the repertoire, and then we’re curious about anything else they may have written, no matter how mediocre. So I say quid pro quo: Listen to some of these Latin-American composers and you’re going to find treasures. Keep digging, just as you have done with the Europeans. I think we need to discover music that we didn’t know before – new music, even if it’s old.

Across the North-South Divide: Conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor makes it her mission to draw attention to modern Latin American composers.
By Josef Woodard

Silvestre Revueltas, for North American audiences, is something of a musical late bloomer. Born in Mexico on New Year’s Eve at the turn of the last century, he was dead from alcoholic indulgence by 1940. He has long been a cult hero among serious new music fans, revered for his challenging modernism and warm musicality. But outside specialized circles, and especially outside Mexico, his work has been little-known and less played. As this century turns, however, Revueltas is getting a second look, and Southern California’s music scene is part of the reason.

Last year, the Los Angeles Philharmonic released a recording of Revueltas’ music that was just nominated for a Grammy this month. More focused, ongoing attention has been paid to the Mexican icon up the road apiece, in Santa Barbara, courtesy of Uruguayan-born conductor Gisèle Ben-Dor. In her sixth season as head of the Santa Barbara Symphony, Ben-Dor has been making Revueltas part of her ensemble’s mission for the last two years.

Since 1998, Ben-Dor has devoted one program a year on an eight or nine-program agenda to exploring Latin American composers. Revueltas always makes an appearance. First it was his ballet “La Coronela,” which was also included on the orchestra’s well-received debut all-Revueltas CD. In 1999, it was “La Noche de los Mayas” along with work by Rodrigo, Falla and Copland’s “Danzon Cubano.”

This season, Ben-Dor is upping the ante, with the four-day Silvestre Revueltas Music Festival starting Thursday. Built around two symphony concerts Saturday and next Sunday, the festival also includes lectures, chamber concerts, Mexican puppet theater, an exhibition of Revueltas’ manuscripts and screenings of films he scored in the seminal movie-music era of the ’30s.

Highlights include a performance of Revueltas’ score for the short film “Redes” (Nets), along with a screening of the film in the orchestra’s performance home, the Arlington Theater, and the U.S. premiere of Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Symphony No. 10 “Amerindia” – Villa-Lobos was a Revueltas’ counterpart in Brazil.

As a musician with Latin American roots and an abiding interest in music of our time, Ben-Dor has long been an avid Revueltas supporter. She feels that his music has been unfairly cast as being difficult. While he drew on elements of modernism – dissonance, jagged rhythms, polytonality – Revueltas also had a gift for tender, melodic writing.

Ben-Dor argues for Revueltas’ place among 20th century stars. “You could point to Falla or you could use Bartok,” she says. “There is so much of Stravinsky in his music, too. He uses the fold music idiom, so you could say also that there is a Copland-ish direction. He makes up his own tunes, in the form of the mariachi music or street bands or whatever. In that sense, as a real revolutionary, as an enfant terrible , he’s very much like Ives. You can draw many comparisons, because there’s a lot of variety in the music.”

On New Year’s Day, the affable Ben-Dor sat down for an interview at the beach-front hotel where the New Jersey resident stays while in Santa Barbara to lead the symphony. She spoke about the coming multifaceted festival and clutched a brochure protectively, saying, “It’s my baby, and it was a lot of work. We have a lot of lollipops here, something for everyone, including children.”

In a suave black outfit and a bright red sash, she looked none the worse for the Y2K wear, having led the symphony’s annual New Year’s Eve pops concert the night before. One of the confections in a lighthearted program was the conducting debut of her youngest son, 8-year-old Gabriel, guiding the orchestra in “It’s a Small World” and “Do Re Mi.” The rest of her family, husband Eli Ben-Dor and her other son Roy, was in the audience.

Ben-Dor, at 12, wasn’t much older when she organized her friends in Montevideo, Uruguay, into a band and made herself the leader.

“I had no idea it could be a profession or that I would someday be doing this as a living. I had no role models. I didn’t even know this was called conducting. It was completely instinctive. It’s like a kid playing with blocks. He or she doesn’t understand that one day they’ll be an engineer.”

Ben-Dor, the daughter of Polish immigrants, studied piano in her formative years and taught herself guitar, absorbing music, she says, “in both direction” – high art and street sounds. “As a kid, I played a lot of Latin American folk music, the music of the Andes, of Mexico, down south in Argentina and Uruguay where they have the same kind of folklore and Caribbean music. I played all of that apart from concertos and recitals.”

She finished high school in Uruguay and moved to Israel with her family in 1973. Committed to learning the conductor’s art, she studied at the Tel Aviv Academy of Music and at Yale, where she graduated in 1982. Things fell into place with a debut with the Israel Philharmonic in 1983 and the advocacy of Leonard Bernstein, who recognized her talent and brought her to the Tanglewood Young Artists Orchestra to hone her skills.

“I was one of the lucky ones,” she says of that connection. “He had a passion for working with young people. I know it sounds like a cliché, and maybe even corny, but he was inspiring. It’s not like you learned this or that gesture, or this point of view. It was his entire personality: This was a life that was devoted to music. [Without devotion], you can’t survive in this profession. That fire is what keeps you going. It’s treacherous, it’s bumpy. Working with Bernstein was like a light along the way.”

In addition to leading the Santa Barbara Symphony, Ben-Dor was chosen by the musicians of the Boston Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra as their conductor. In recent years, she has developed a reputation as a versatile, adaptable guest conductor, not to mention one of the rare women in a world still dominated by maestros. She has led the New York Philharmonic a few times, most recently as a last-minute fill-in in March, leading Mahler’s Fourth, without a score or rehearsal. In November, while in Santa Barbara lead the symphony, she got a last-minute call to head the Israel Philharmonic.

As much as she likes Latin music, Ben-Dor is quick to point out that her repertory covers a wide range of composers. “I do absolutely everything,” she says, “and I enjoy it, too. I’m a Mahler-Beethoven-Brahms-Schumann conductor. I like all facets of the repertoire.”

Still, she doesn’t mind that she is becoming particularly known for 20th century Latin American music.

“I do it because it’s natural for me to do it,” she says. “It’s my mother tongue.”

She also brings a crusader’s zeal to working with an underexposed niche of the classical repertory. “Think of all Latin American composers,” she says, “and how little of their music is known. You have an entire continent that has been so fruitful, and we know so little about their music.”

Ben-Dor recognizes that Latin American music’s relative obscurity has to do with cultural geo-politics, and the Eurocentricity of classical music. “There is a big divide between north and south,” she says. “These are countries that have struggled. They have enormous social, economic, sometimes geographical obstacles, and there has not been enough political muscle to get the music out. You cannot say it’s the music, because there’s a lot of great stuff out there.”

Breve Biografía de Gisèle Ben-Dor

Gisèle Buka Ben-Dor nació en 1955 en Uruguay. Directora de orquestas.

Comenzó muy pequeña sus estudios de piano en música clásica, pero sentía fuerte inclinación hacia la dirección. Siguió cursos de Ciencias Económicas para continuar la profesión de su padre, que era contador, pero su vocación seguía siendo la música. Sus padres, inmigrantes polacos Leon y Selva Buka han apoyado y estimulado su deseo de estudiar música, “sea lo que sea que hagas, tienes que hacerlo bien”.