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Articles
Classic CD
February 1999
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 coexists (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 conducting 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 determined
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 overexposure.
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."
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