Page 748 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

“It was a very bizarre thing,” she recalled. “I’m very cack-handed, and in school we had three

months of metalwork, three months of pottery, and three months of doing woodwork.” She was

“appalling” at the first two but had a knack for the third, so she crafted a recorder and when she

played it her music teacher said: “My God you’re good at the recorder, why don’t you try a
flute?” Why not, she thought — so the teacher came the next day with a Rudall Carte wooden

flute. From then on Ben-Tovim played only the wooden flute, even with the Liverpool

Philharmonic, and never had time for its silver sibling.

She was confident, even arrogant occasionally, and when she decided that she did not like her

first flute teacher’s vibrato she signed herself up for the Royal Academy of Music. Her

formative years were spent in Ealing, west London, where she played at the National Youth

Orchestra and where, given the lack of women and her obscure-sounding name, she was placed
in the men’s dormitories.

She played her first concerto on television with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of
16. Barely 12 months later she performed at a Henry Wood Promenade Concert at the Royal

Albert Hall.

Ben-Tovim found her teacher Gareth Morris’s methods limiting (“F major for two years”) and

she taught music four days a week on the side, acquiring some 40 pupils by the age of 18.

Yet she was desperate to get a job in an orchestra and went to bed every night with her score

sheets, poring over every bar. “They were a part of my breathing,” she said.

When she was 21, and had just married for the first time, Ben-Tovim went to Paris on a

scholarship awarded by the French government. She found her new teacher, Fernand Caratgé,

who always taught in a bright velvet jacket, much more exacting. Ben-Tovim was renting a

room from a clairvoyant who complained that her playing was “disturbing the spirits”, so she

hired a studio to practise in for four hours every day.

When she was offered the position of second flute with Sadler’s Wells, Ben-Tovim turned it

down. “I thought, I’m just not a second flute,” she said. “I’m not the right temperament.” She
applied instead to play the piccolo but was rejected because she was unsuited to that

temperament too — she was not a person able to “sit there patiently and wait for their solo”.