O.C. MUSIC : Bias Is Conducting Itself More Subtly Today, Says Ben-Dor

Today more women than ever are conductors, but that still means only a handful in a profession dominated by men.

“The bias is still there,” says Gisele Ben-Dor, who conducts the Orange County Symphony in Garden Grove on Saturday.

“It’s more subtle than it was 50 years ago when they said to a woman, ‘No, you can’t join the conductor’s class. Period.’ Today, the biases are still there on the part of some audiences, reviewers and some board members of orchestras. But to be honest, I have no generalities about this. Sometimes I have found women hostile and sometimes I’ve found older men very helpful and appreciative. I don’t have any statistics.”

Ben-Dor, 36, was speaking by phone from her home in Englewood Cliffs, N.Y. She moved there with her family last August from Houston after she won concurrent appointments as music director of the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra in Boston and the Annapolis Symphony in Maryland.

She had been resident conductor of the Houston Symphony from 1988 to 1991, but “I didn’t think I could handle residency, two new positions and guesting in other places,” she said.

“I was able to do all those things and have a baby, but I couldn’t have stayed there. . . . My life had become very complicated.”

Den-Dor gave birth to her second son, Gabriel Abraham, last November. Her first son, Roy Immanuel, was born in 1983, shortly after she made her professional conducting debut, with the Israel Philharmonic when she was nine months’ pregnant.

Having both a family and a career are “not that impossible,” Ben-Dor said. “It’s just a matter of timing. Definitely having a baby at the beginning of an active career was not easy. But I’m optimistic. It’s working out so far.”

Den-Dor was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and began conducting at 12. When the military took over her country in 1973, she immigrated with her family to Israel. She was 18.

She earned a master’s degree in conducting from the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University in 1980, then went to Yale, where she got a second master’s degree in 1982.

After her “Rite” debut, she went on to became the first woman conducting fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, and she led the orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl in 1984. Musical America picked her as one of the prominent “Young Artists of 1990.”

“Today, opportunities are there,” she stressed. “I had opportunities. . . . I used them successfully, most of time.”

She feels particularly grateful that “in these two positions that I have in Boston and Annapolis--especially in Boston--I was picked by the players.

“The bottom line for an artist is (knowing) who really respects you,” she said. “I am grateful that my work is appreciated by my colleagues.”

Ben-Dor is hoping to return the favor for another woman by conducting Amy Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony on the Garden Grove program.

At one time Beach, who lived from 1867 to 1944, was widely regarded as the doyenne of American female composers. But even though she is credited as the first American woman to compose a symphony, her music and name largely have passed from the music scene.

But Ben-Dor regards her symphony, based on Irish folk tunes, “a masterpiece, a great symphony.

“It is so well crafted and so full of musical ideas,” she said. “I don’t think of it as a ‘woman’s’ piece at all,” Ben-Dor said.

“I’m not really political about this at all. I am being very candid and spontaneous in my admiration. It’s a piece I absolutely love.”

Cast in the traditional four movements, the work, composed in 1894, made a great impression at its premiere two years later by the Boston Symphony.

Highlights, Ben-Dor said, include a slow movement that is “a long song” and “a finale that is “ablaze . . . with a beautifully blooming climax.”

“You easily recognize it as 19th-Century Romantic music. You could hear other composers in it if you wanted to, but I think that’s unfair. The piece is an original work in its own right.

“It’s an anachronistic phenomenology that we are guilty of because we know all the other great symphonies and we don’t know the Amy Beach Symphony. If we had known the Amy Beach Symphony as well and at the same time, we may have heard passages of Amy Beach in a Mendelssohn symphony! We are a little biased because we come to Amy Beach after we know everything else.

“Being a woman was a big problem” for Beach, the conductor added. “I’ve read reviews of her music. The amazing thing is that when the music was praised, it was praised to stress that what was good was good because she was a woman.

“The melodic sections were found acceptable because everyone knows that women have lyric talent. I’m being a little ironic in saying this.

“But when the music was berated, it also was because she was a woman. If a section wasn’t powerful enough, well, clearly, (it was because) women don’t have a talent for that.

“It was so biased from every point of view. I wonder if people could really listen to it in any objective way. I’m sure it was this bias that kept her unrecognized.”

* Gisele Ben-Dor will conduct the Orange County Symphony in Amy Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony, Dvorak’s “Carnival” Overture and Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme,” with cellist Magdalena Doikova, on Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Don Wash Auditorium, 11271 Stanford Ave., Garden Grove. $10 to $25. (714) 534-1103.