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Articles
The Los Angeles Times
January 16, 2000
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."
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