LIFE

Joan Benson is internationally known for the beauty of her clavichord and fortepiano playing as well as her delicate approach to the modern piano. Her artistry is enhanced by her remarkable life.

As a child, Joan Benson lived in the New Orleans of early jazz. The first progressive school in the Deep South stimulated her talent for the arts. She heard Sergei Rachmaninoff and Ignace Paderwski play and studied with the composer-pianist Percy Grainger.

At 24, Benson received the Kate Neal Kinley International Award for "outstanding powers of artistic communication." In Europe, she became a protégé of Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer, along with Alfred Brendel. Praised for her magical soft sounds in Lucerne's Summer Festival, she turned to the clavichord as a medium.

After years of clavichord study with Fritz Neumeyer in Germany and Santiago Kastner in Portugal, Benson returned to the United States to join the faculty of Stanford University. Her first recording in 1962 was selected by Saturday Review as one of the finest of the year.

Joan Benson's worldwide tours bring fresh insights to audiences.She likes to allow time before a performance to absorb and adapt to the atmosphere in which she is playing. Consequently, there is an aliveness in her concerts and master classes that makes them never the same but always complete and fulfilling.

The excitement of travel and the beauty of exodic places always inspire her. While an exchange artist in the Middle East, she hiked on her own throughout Lebanon and parts of Syria and Turkey, in areas dangerous for a Westerner. She danced the dapki with young Syrian villagers, visited harems in Damascus, worked with English archaeologists in the pink tombs of Petra, and wandered among forgotten ruins with an Armenian architect. She listened to a nomad playing the rebaba by moonlight in a remote Jordanian valley. In Beirut, she lived in a convent, and at the Mount of Olives, she almost became a Russian Orthodox novice. All these experiences are reflected in her music, enlarging her outlook of the world and her understanding of rhythm, ornamentation, melody and tone.

After hiking in New Zealand's highest mountains, Benson's Auchland concert was cited as one of the most exciting of the year. At the Chinese University in Hong Kong, she introduced a yang-chin player on her concert and spontaneously compared this soft instrument with the clavichord. In Indonesia, while a lone guest in the Javanese palace of Keraton, she responded to the finest of gamelan music. Her performance on national television reflected the rhythmic intensity of Bali; in the country, Indonesians circled around her, praising her for this program.

Benson has also traveled inwardly as a Buddhist student. She began with Japan's Suzuki Roshi at Tassajara, and later with Thich Nhat Hanh in Plum Village, France. Tibet's Venerable Bogar Rinpoche and Thrangu Rinpoche led her to silent retreats in the monasteries of Salt Spring Island and Nova Scotia.