Nelly Ben-Or - Biography

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.

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 World War II 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, a former textiles factory in Janowska Street in Lvov and executed.

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. They were reunited with the sister after the War.

Ben-Or frequently gives talks about her experiences during the Holocaust.

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.

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.

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.

External links

• Ben-Or at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
• Ben-Or and the Alexander Technique
• Ben-Or and the 2008 International Alexander Technique Congress