"I find the process of confronting and juxtaposing traditional, formal means with contemporary vocabulary to be highly challenging and of great curiosity.
One of the most fundamental issues in my work, and the aim of my musical creation, is to use traditional, ethnic music materials in the compositional
processes and thereby participate in the essence of oral tradition: transmission of essence, through evolution of expression: preservation and change.

I do not seek these materials out of any scientific-musicological point of view. They serve purely as a dramatic stimulus and as a point of reference.
Close scrutiny of these sources uncovers hidden, unpremeditated musical means, which invite further extension and development.
These traditional melodies and texts undergo thorough transformation, so profound as to make their original form, at times, unrecognizable,
yet their spirit  and highly-charged dramatic potential remain untouched."  Betty Olivero

Betty Olivero belongs to Israels leading composers. Her music is worldwide highly appreciated and performed many times.
She studied at the Rubin Academy/Tel Aviv and at the Yale University. A Leonard Bernstein Scholarship enabled her to work at Tanglewood with Luciano Berio, with whom she continued to study in Italy. During most of her career, she lived and worked in Italy, before she moved to Israel in 2002.

In Israel, she was the first female composer to receive a professorship at Israel's prestigous Bar-Illan University. Likewise, she was the first woman to be appointed "composer in residence" of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

Aside a vital musicality and a strong emotionality, it's mainly the subtlety with which she adopts, processes and develops elements of ethnic and traditional music which gives her music it's particular attraction and importance.

Her style is coherent and non-eclectic, yet combines elements as diverse as Judeo-Spanish (sephardic) music, Arab tunes and medieval music integrated into a contemporary musical language.
Folk material appears in rich, nuanced arrangements, or is blended through avant-garde transformations into textures featuring dense heterophony, rhythmic complexity and rich orchestration.
These processes touch on wide and complex areas of contrast, such as east and west, holy and secular, traditional and new.

Olivero has been awarded with many prices and honors. Aside the prestigous and internationally most important Koussevitzky Award granted to her by the Koussevitzky Foundation and the Library of Congress /Washington, she is a laureate of the Fromm Music Foundation (USA) and won several times important Israeli award (Award for the Performing Arts, ACUM prize for Life Achievements and for Achievement of the Year, Prime Minister's Prize e.a.) 

Luciano Berio sagte über sie:
"I think that [Betty Olivero] is one of the most authentic musical forces now, one of the most self-aware and deeply connected to today’s Jewish music. …
As a composer, she is a most impressive voice in Jewish culture and an important presence from a worldwide perspective as well.  [...]
What is great about her is that she does not use the tradition as an ideological tool or, worse, as a political tool. She uses the spiritual dimension... "