In the Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed recently hailed Gisèle Ben-Dor as "a star on the rise," "a ferocious talent," and “just the conductor we have been waiting for to make a really persuasive case for Latin composers." Since her dramatic last minute debut with the New York Philharmonic (substituting for Kurt Masur) with no rehearsal or scores, Gisèle Ben-Dor has appeared with the New York Philharmonic in Central Park before an estimated audience of 100,000 as well as in the festival of contemporary British composers in 1998. A frequent guest conductor throughout the U.S., Europe and Israel, she has led orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Boston Pops, Israel Philharmonic, Jerusalem Symphony, Israel Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, and Houston Symphony, whom she led in the nationally broadcast inauguration of President Bush at the Kennedy Center. In addition to being reengaged by many of these orchestras, she has led many others in the United States and abroad. This is her second recording for KOCH International. Her first highly praised recording was devoted to the music of Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera (Glosses on Themes of Pablo Casals and Variaciones Concertantes). Another recording of Ginastera's music, (a world premiere of the complete ballet Estancia and Panambi) is soon to be released by BMG/Conifer. She has also recorded music of Béla Bartók for the Centaur label, as well as the music of David Ott and John Adams. 
     Currently, Ms. Ben-Dor is the Music Director of the Santa Barbara Symphony, with her contract renewed through the year 2001, and the Boston ProArte Chamber Orchestra (where she has the distinction of having been chosen by the musicians themselves). There, the Boston Globe describes her as "a tremendous musician, an expert technician and a charismatic performer". Her talent was recognized by Leonard Bernstein with whom she worked at Tanglewood, and at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. She made her conducting debut with the Israel Philharmonic in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring which was televised by the BBC/London. 
     She is also a winner of the Bartók Prize of the Hungarian Television, and has toured Eastern Europe. Born and raised in Uruguay of Polish parents, Ms. Ben-Dor is a graduate of` the Tel-Aviv Academy of music and the Yale school of Music. (more) 

     Exceptional performance, innovative programming, and critical acclaim are key to the growing excellence and success of the Santa Barbara Symphony. An 81-piece orchestral ensemble now entering its 46th concert season, the orchestra continues to capture widespread media attention and draw favorable comparisons with orchestras of larger metropolitan areas. 
     Giséle Ben-Dor was unanimously chosen as music director of the Santa Barbara Symphony, beginning with its 1994-95 concert season.  Her tenure has been marked by dramatic increase in a broad spectrum of rarely performed and newly commissioned symphonic works. A timeless heritage of favorite masterworks is always held primarily to expansion of the orchestra's perspective of American music -- music of all the Americas. 
     The Santa Barbara Symphony serves a community where cross-cultural Hispanic influence is clearly evidenced in its geographical, architectural, and demographic character. Accordingly, through recent concert seasons, great care has been taken with the orchestra's interpretations not only of pieces by Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and Michael Tilson Thomas, but also of significant works by Silvestre Revueltas, Roberto Xavier Rodriguez, Alberto Ginastera, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Miguel del Aguila.

   
E-mail the Symphony at: symphony@rain.org

About Silvestre Revueltas

     As a candidate for the pantheon of tragic cult figures, Silvestre Revueltas was as perfect as they come. At his death in 1940, the composer had left a substantial body of work quite revolutionary for its time, kept many personal details of his life obscured, lived hard and died young in poverty.
     So perhaps we can look the other way if his work has long been overshadowed by the legend. Only as we enter the 21st century, it seems, are we ready to embrace this artist born on the last day of the 19th century (December 31, 1899). For more has changed than simple historical perspective. The rediscovery of Revueltas nearing his centenary marks a major shift in politics both musical - correcting several decades of misdirected scholarship - and international, inviting the horizontal bridge of culture between the United States and Europe to again look vertically. 
     The common perception at mid-centurv, vocalized by no less a figure than Leonard Bernstein, was that Revueltas might have been a great composer "had he lived”-- a position attacked by Peter Garland as being a valid statement only for people who know his entire body of work in the first place. (Garland’s 1991 study In Search of Silvestre Revueltas published by Soundings Press remains the most comprehensive in English, though it too is far from complete). 
     The most dogged professional demon pursuing Revueltas during his own time was the charge of dilettantism--fueled in part by fallout from his personal demon of alcohol dependence. His inadherence to European models, comparable in many ways to Charles Ives, was often perceived as ignorance and insufficient training rather than rejection. 
     But as we glance back over the musical currents of the century, we find that wherever we look, Revueltas (like Ives) was likely there. Putting Europe's musical models to rest? Revueltas used folklore not as quotes within a familiar structure, but in ways that pull that structure apart. Breaking down the barriers between high and low art? His Homenaje a Garcia Lorca has the body of a chamber work and the soul of a mariachi. Rhythm as an essential basis of structure? His film score to La noche de los Mayas Sounds like Stravinsky's Rite of Spring on mescal. 
     In his eulogy in Modern Music, the composer and novelist Paul Bowles called Revueltas "the Mexican Falla" in that both managed to take the music of the streets and taverns and dress it for the concert hall with little of the purity lost. "Revueltas knew the bases of music: the noises that accompany drunkenness and abandon," wrote Bowles. "He had played in border bars and dives and movie houses in his youth. With this education his approach could only be healthy. He knew what music was for and what it was about.” 
     For Revueltas, whose teenage years were spent in the throws of the Mexican Revolution, music was about establishing national identity in much the same way as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo approached painting. Revueltas is often linked to his fellow nationalist composer Carlos Chávez, though the pairing tends to highlight their differences rather than similarities. Where Chávez, like Aaron Copland, seemed drawn to landscapes and a grand sense of "Mexicanism," Revueltas's sympathies and models were found in the world around him. Shutting the door on the old cultural models was, by extension, a rejection of colonial society; his musical vulgarity an embrace of the people. In a quite literal sense, Revueltas’s art was revolutionary. 
     This is no more apparent than in his ballet La Coronela. Written for the choreographer Waldeen (the single-namrd pioneer of modern dance in Mexico), La Cononela follows a scenario drawn from a series of skeleton figures by the Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada. The story, depicting the overthrow of the decadent bourgeois by the working class, was dear to Revueltas’s heart and he devoted most of his final year to its composition. Seven weeks before the ballet’s scheduled premier, Revueltas died of bronchial pneumonia, leaving the final section unfinished. The work was turned over to composer Blas Galindo to complete and to Candelario Huízar to orchestrate. The premiere went on as scheduled on November 23, 1940 at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes. 
     But the troubles with La Coronela did not stop there. When the conductor José Limantour began compiling a tribute to Revueltas in 1957, he discovered that the Galindo- Huízar version had vanished without a trace. Undaunted, he began his own research, reconstructing the original manuscript and commissioned a new orchestration of three completed episodes from Eduardo Hernández Moncada, who had conducted the work in its premiere. The final episode Limantour compiled himself from Revueltas`s film scores to Váminos com Pancho Villa! (1935) and Los de abajo (1939), and this version was finally premiered in 1962 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, with Limantour conducting the National Symphony Orchestra. 
     As a concert work, La Coronela (“The Lady Colonel”) arranges the four ballet episodes in four movements, that proceed practically without pause. The first, ("Society Lady of Those Times”, the upper crust of 1900) further divides into three sections, each constantly shifting duple and triple meter. The second movement, entitled (“The Disinherited”) is more plaintive, recalling working class life under dictatorship. 
     “Don Ferruco’s Nightmare” opens with “The Party" that, although it sustains a waltz tempo for the only time in the piece, is filled with discordant harmonies that clearly reveal the cracks in the social facade. The party begins to turn sour with appearances of (“The Scoundrel and the Simple Girl") and ("The Middle Class Lady,”) as the waltz alternates with an increasingly complex Mexican song that begins to dominate the proceedings. The movement finishes with The Lady Colenel, surrounded by her military harkens back to the days of the Revolution. 
     The fourth movement, (“The Last Judgment,”) begins abruptly with an appropriately violent passage entitled “The Battle.” The military call of a solo trumpet (“Taps”) the honors The Fallen, and the piece concludes with a reprise of  “The Lady Colonel” theme, this time with full orchestra. 
     Controversy of course surrounded the project, calling its authenticity into question at every turn. particularly in the fourth movement. How much was the work of the composer or the orchestrator was debated even during rehearsal, when the conductor Limantour embellished Hernandez Moncada’s orchestration for performance, arguing that its model, Revueltas film scores, was restricted by personnel constraints irrelevant to the forces of a symphony orchestra. 
     The version recorded here is the premiere recording of Hernández Moncada's original orchestration. Its controversy aside, the work is filled to bursting with Revueltas's spirit, its characters unfolding in the musical equivallent of a Diego Rivera mural. 
     The other pieces on this recording, Itinerarios ("Travel Diary") and Colorines are works from the beginning and end of Revueltas’s most fertile creative period. Itinerarios from 1938 is one of Revueltas's most solemn works, with more of a broad melodic sweep and less of the rhythmic and formal innovations of his most radical pieces. Rhythm is still a driving force, however, and even the pieces intense lyricism maintains a rhythmic function. Like his Homenaje a Garcia Lorca, -- Itinerarios is a lament -- as many have suggested, for Spain. 
     Colorines (1932), a symphonic poem for chamber orchestra, reveals just how fully developed Revueltas's compositional voice was, even in his earliest orchestral works. Though he would develop greater skill in his use of folkloric materials -- and break conventions with greater confidence -- his sense of complex rhythmic propulsion, firmly balanced by a meditative lyricism, are both present in an unmistakably personal sense of proportion.