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Discography
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Alberto Ginastera
- Panambí - Ballet - World Premiere Recording
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Gramophone
A lifetime's work ahead
January, 1999
 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!'
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