Nelly Ben-Or
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nelly Nechama Ben-Or, also known as Nelly Ben-Or Clynes, was born in 1933 in Lwow in Poland. She is an international concert pianist and a Professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama where she has taught the piano and the Alexander Technique since 1975. She is also a Holocaust survivor.
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[edit] The Holocaust
Ben-Or is a Polish Jew. Her father was a travelling salesman for a manufacturer of fountain pens and pencils. The family were not particularly religious, and Ben-Or studied the piano at a young age. After the Second World War broke out in 1939, the Ben-Ors were forced by the Gestapo to leave their apartment and were moved to one room in an already crowded house occupied by other Jewish families. Ben-Or and her mother and sister were given false papers and taken out of the ghetto by a Jewish Czech doctor dressed as an SS officer. Before Ben-Or's father, too, could be rescued, he was taken to the notorious Janowski concentration camp and executed.[1]
Separated from the sister, who went into hiding and who found employment as a domestic servant, Ben-Or and her mother pretended to be Roman Catholics and travelled to Warsaw where the mother worked for a Christian family for a year as a maid. Having missed the last passenger train to Warsaw, the German Station master put them on a train reserved for German Army officers. The family in Warsaw paid for Ben-Or to have piano lessons along with their own daughter. Occasionally, when people suspected they were Jews, they would be forced to move on. Following the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 Ben-Or and her mother were sent on a train to Auschwitz, but managed to escape.[2] They were reunited with the sister after the War.
Ben-Or frequently gives talks about her experiences during the Holocaust.[1]
[edit] Musician
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.[2]
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.[3]
Moving to England in 1960, she met and married her English husband and later moved to Northwood in London.
In 1999 the Nelly Ben-Or Scholarship Trust was established, whose patron is Sir Colin Davis.[4]
