Nelly Ben-Or

Nelly Nechama Ben-Or (born 1933), also known as Nelly Ben-Or Clynes, is a concert pianist and professor of music. She is a professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the United Kingdom where she has taught the piano and the Alexander technique since 1975. Ben-Or is a Holocaust survivor.

Nelly Ben-Or
Born
Nelly Nechama Ben-Or

1933
Lwow, Poland
Other namesNelly Ben-Or Clynes

Early life

Ben-Or was born in 1933 to a Jewish family in Lwow, Poland (now Ukraine).

During World War II, her family was imprisoned in a ghetto. Her mother, sister and Nelly escaped, but her father did not. When they obtained false identities, she was separated from her sister, who went into hiding and found employment as a domestic servant. Ben-Or and her mother pretended to be Roman Catholics and travelled to Warsaw, where her mother worked for a Christian family for a year as a maid. Having missed the last passenger train to Warsaw, they were placed by the German station master on a train reserved for Wehrmacht officers. The family in Warsaw paid for Ben-Or to have piano lessons along with their own daughter after hearing her play. Occasionally, when people suspected they were Jews, they would be forced to move on, but managed to escape.[1][2]

Career

A distinguished pianist, and a senior Alexander Technique teacher (in 1963 she became the first pianist to qualify as a teacher of the Alexander Technique), Ben-Or is internationally acknowledged as being the leading exponent of the application of the Alexander Technique to piano playing, in which field she has specialised for more than thirty-five years. She gives master classes on the technique to pianists in many countries throughout the world.[3]

She has performed in concerts and broadcasts throughout the world, in recitals, with orchestra and in chamber music. Ben-Or has made numerous commercial and broadcast recordings, including for the BBC. These recordings cover music by a wide range of composers from the 18th to the 20th centuries.[4]

Moving to England in 1960, she met and married her English husband and later moved to Northwood in London.

In the late 1980s, she taught young Brendan Kavanagh classical piano, helping him complete his Grade 8 theory and practical requirements. He credits his success today as an improvisational classical/boogie-woogie pianist to her support and encouragement of his improvisational style.[5]:01:28

In 1999, the Nelly Ben-Or Scholarship Trust was established, whose patron is Sir Colin Davis.[4]

gollark: I decided to look at the code in more detail. This was a mistake. It contained thousands of lines with minimally useful comments, for some reason its own implementation of hash tables (this is very C, I suppose), and apparently its own implementation of WiFi mesh things even though that should really be handled generically for any device.
gollark: After I was able to work through git's terrible CLI enough to make that work, and "fixed" some merge conflicts, it somehow compiled still, but upon plugging in the thing, hung things again. I had dmesg open, and apparently it was a page fault somehow in the code assigning names or something?
gollark: Then I noticed that they had merged patches a lot from the repo for a similar wireless chip, so I decided to just try and merge the "kernel 5.10 compatibility" thing from that, which had not made it in yet.
gollark: There was a repo on GitHub for doing that with it, but `insmod`ing it after compiling *somehow* hung my kernel so I had to reboot.
gollark: I mean, possibly. I wanted to get my USB WiFi thing to work in monitor mode for testing for non-evil purposes, but it was just really bad to do so.

References
  1. Nelly Ben-Or Clynes Story. Pub. by Northwood and Pinner Synagogue (2008)
  2. Liphshiz, Cnaan. "Nelly Ben-Or risked all to play the piano. It helped her survive the Holocaust". www.timesofisrael.com. Retrieved 29 February 2020.
  3. Piano Courses and The Alexander Technique
  4. Guildhall School of Music and Drama: Department of Piano Studies
  5. "Dr K's classical and boogie-woogie mentors (01:28)". YouTube. Retrieved 24 January 2020.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.