The leading lady behind Lehman music

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Eva Bornstein sat behind the long desk in her office at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, narrating the story of her life, against the backdrop of a bookshelf-lined wall and a gallery of photographs – portraits of herself collected over the years. 

Ms. Bornstein is an administrator, the Lehman center’s executive director. But the woman who has been cast in this art manager’s role – and who has performed it brilliantly for 11 years – is, at heart, a prima donna. 

“Once an actress, always an actress,” Ms. Bornstein said, with a coy tone in her modulated voice. 

Her study is sunken a step from the main box-office floor of the Lehman center and softly lighted – the parlor of an artiste rather than a bureaucrat’s place of business, an orchestra pit from which she conducts the operations of the most-renowned theater in the Bronx and one of the best-known in the city. 

She personally presents each performance at the Lehman center, taking the stage to introduce the artists to a 2,300-strong audience. She speaks smoothly and with authority – her knowledge of the arts is immense – and with a Polish accent, emphasizing a link to her native land she has carried through decades in Britain, Canada and the United States. 

Ms. Bornstein is credited with transforming the Lehman center and promoting the world’s leading Latino artists on the traditionally non-Latino stage of a mainstream theater. Her own career spans half the globe, and the story of her life, as Ms. Bornstein tells it, is filled with events as dazzlingly diverse as the array of artists she brings to the northwest Bronx. 

Escape from Communism 

Born in Poland when the country was part of the communist bloc, she “fell in love” with music and the ballet as a way of escaping the grim reality of the communist regime, and studied acting at the Ludwik Solski Academy for the Dramatic Arts in Poland’s Krakow, she said. 

“If there was anything uplifting, it was the arts and entertainment,” Ms. Bornstein said. There was a dreamlike quality to acting: “You use your imagination, and you escape to a different world,” she said. 

“I decided to become an actress because I wanted to improve the world of communist Poland at the time, I wanted to make life brighter,” Ms. Bornstein said. And perhaps the celebrity status of actors also played a part: “Here, in America, you have to be a movie star to be a celebrity. But in Poland, even if you performed only in a theater, you were a super-celebrity.” 

Two of Ms. Bornstein’s former college classmates and closest friends, Anna Dymna and Marzena Trybala, have become celebrated actresses in Poland, she said, adding, with the laugh of a good-natured prima donna: “I could have been the third famous actress.”

She left Poland in 1975, accepting a part in a film that was being shot in Paris, she said. The gig offered a way to escape communist Poland, and also to stay closer to her fiance of the time, a Polish composer who was headed to London, she said.

A trailblazer at 24

But shortly after the stint Paris and London, UK, she moved again – to London, Canada, Ms. Bornstein said. Having studied art management at the York University in Toronto, she got a job as a presenter at the University of Western Ontario in Canada’s London. 

She met with the university president, Ms. Bornstein recalls, and “he said, ‘Eva, I’m going to give you cart blanche … to develop cultural events at my college, under one condition: You have to raise the money. What you raise, is yours [to spend], but don’t come to me asking for money.’” 

She was 23 at the time, Ms. Bornstein said, and looking back at it, she recalls her work in Ontario as something of a miracle: Performers whose concerts she was able to arrange at the university’s alumni hall during the next year included the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Dizzy Gillespie. 

“I transformed the alumni hall into a legitimate performing arts center at the age of 24,” she said. “And then, I discovered that there were other theaters on campus... So, on one night, we would have performances in all three auditoriums simultaneously. And I was able to market [the concerts] to the audience, so that the houses were always full.”

How did she accomplish that? “I don’t know, I don’t remember,” Ms. Bornstein said. “I remember I worked very hard and had a lot of energy. I was young. I talked to everyone – I talked to the mayor, I talked to the teachers – I was fearless.” 

The gallery wall in her Lehman office includes a picture of Ms. Bornstein from her time in Ontario – a young woman of about 23, with wavy blonde hair falling below her shoulders, hugging an Irish setter. The other photos show a more mature woman, who has traded curly tresses for a short bob haircut. 

This year marks Ms. Bornstein’s 11th season at the Lehman center – a theater where she arrived after a series of jobs “all over the world, all over the country,” and one she has also transformed, similarly to what she had done in Ontario. 

The music of the community

She recalls her surprise at seeing the “beautiful” leafy streets and a welcoming campus of the Lehman College, instead of a grimy neighborhood she had expected to find in the Bronx, when she came in for her first job interview. And she recalls her uncertainty about what kinds of music to present at the arts center, after she got the job. 

“So, here I am in the Bronx, and I’m thinking: What is it that these people could relate to?” she said. “So, I listened to the music, I walked around, listened to the music of the community – and there was a car wash, right across from the Bedford Park Boulevard station, and salsa music was blaring, full-scale. I walked around and I had so much salsa music that I made a pact with myself then and there that this is what I’m going to concentrate on.” 

She has stayed true to the pact: This year’s season opens on Sept. 17 with a performance by Eddie Palmieri, a nine-time Grammy winner and one of the most influential salsa artists in the word. The concert is billed as a “sizzling evening with salsa legend.”

The season will also see a performance by the Havana Cuba All-Stars, some of Cuba’s greatest and most prominent living musicians, whose music Ms. Bornstein finds “amazing, unbelievable,” she said. And Cuban music, different at it is in style from the music of eastern Europe, also strikes a note to which Ms. Bornstein can relate – precisely because of her early life in a grim communist Poland. 

“No matter what they [Cubans] do in music, it’s superior, it’s fantastic,” she said. “Obviously, what happens here is … in order to face the grim reality of Cuba, they are concentrating on their culture, and this is how they survive.” 

Ukrainian symphony

This season, the Lehman center will also feature artists from both Russia and Ukraine – two former Soviet republics that have been embroiled in a bitter conflict over Moscow’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and Russia’s support for separatist insurgents in Ukraine’s east. The conflict between Moscow-backed rebels and government forces in eastern Ukraine is now in its third year and has claimed more than 9,500 lives, according to United Nations figures.

As the fighting has raged in eastern Ukraine, the Donetsk National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater has continued its performances. The music, which went on even amid artillery fire, presented another demonstration of a universal human desire to escape misery through the solace of art. 

Ukraine’s National Symphony Orchestra will be performing at the Lehman center on Feb. 12, followed by the Russian National Ballet on March 12.  

Ms. Bornstein denies any political significance in the programming, but she acknowledges she is happy to give the stage to the Ukrainian orchestra. 

“Because of my background, I can’t hide my heart, I would like to present the Ukrainian orchestra, because the people have suffered so much, and I have suffered, and for me to be able to present this kind of culture – I’m very proud of it,” she said. 

Connecting cultures

The Lehman center’s programming is also a reflection of Ms. Bornstein’s wish to connect cultures, and to introduce listeners to the styles of music they find unfamiliar. A Latin visitor may get a recommendation from her to watch a performance by the Russian ballet, and an eastern European newcomer may receive a suggestion to take in an evening of salsa, she said. 

“For Puerto Ricans, salsa is what a symphony orchestra is to Ukrainians,” Ms. Bornstein said. 

And what about her own personal favorite among this season’s performers? It is Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet, whose troupe she had brought to the Western Ontario University’s alumni hall four decades ago, she said. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet will perform Dracula at the Lehman center on Nov. 13. 

“They agreed to come to the Bronx because they knew of that story of many years ago,” Ms. Bornstein said. “They knew of my name and they remember that I was a mega-presenter in Canada.” 

Eva Bornstein, Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, Anna Dolgov

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