Page 749 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

When the first flute, James Galway, left, she received a telegram while on holiday in Yugoslavia

inviting her to take up his position. After three months, Ben-Tovim left Sadler’s Wells to work

at a school in Isleworth, west London, where she taught French in exchange for using a room for

“Atarah’s School of Music”. After three weeks she had assembled four pupils but one day she
sat next to a cellist she had known at school, who told her about the vacancy in the Liverpool

orchestra.

The audition was a battle between her and Galway and they were given a piece of difficult sight

reading. “All my life I’ve loved sight reading,” said Ben-Tovim, who used to read her music

upside down to deliberately puzzle the sequences. “It was like all my training from the age of 12

was for that moment. I’ll never forget. Every bar I played perfectly.” Galway, with his “bad

eyesight”, she noted, was not up to the standard.

For her second piece of music, Bach’s Flute Sonata in E major, “I came in as loud as I could,

and I put my whole body into it”, she said. “I was about five stone heavier than I am now,
appallingly dressed, full of unbelievable, physical energy . . . I had the choice at one point of

joining the Israeli army or becoming a discus thrower; I had that kind of physical punch. I think

I still have, really.”

When she was appointed first flute at the age of 22, Ben-Tovim became one of the first female

principal flautists in Britain. Still, she reflected later in life that, had she been a man, it all would
have panned out differently. Her real ambition was to be a conductor, but when she auditioned

she was told that they did not take women.

After a month-long trial with the Liverpool orchestra the other players, all men, complained that

she was too “loud” and “overbearing” and blended in with the clarinets. “They did not want a

woman there, there’s no question,” she said. The head backed her anyway, saying that the

orchestra needed someone with dynamism and energy.

She was required to wear a long black gown and Ben-Tovim had to borrow a particularly tight-

fitting one from a small-boned viola player for one of her first performances. She recalled, with

more amusement than embarrassment, that when she was invited to take a bow, the front of the
skirt split open. “That taught me a fact,” she said. “That made me very humble afterwards.”