Simon Bolivar lives!
I emerged emotionally exhausted from what was undoubtedly one of the most incredible musical experiences I have ever had.
Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela have been celebrated on every media platform all week.
But nothing prepares you for the real thing. The sound, the energy, the scale, the vision, combine to seize your soul like nothing else.
I was sardined into the Royal Festival Hall with 3,500 others on Saturday night. Thousands more were watching on screens elsewhere in the building. In all, 56,000 have passed through the place to share the experience over the past six days.
The orchestra is massive: 220 players wedged onto the stage, including 44 violins, a dozen double basses, and masses of woodwind, brass and timpani. The mere synchronised movement of the battalions of string bows conjured visions of Greek oarsmen or one of those vast Russian movies of the 1930s.
The energy and the scale of the noise, together with the balletic exuberance, drew the emotions across the hall. The music opened with vibrant Latin American pieces before making way for Stravinsky’s incredible Rite of Spring.
I kept thinking about the journey many of the players have made, often from poverty through El Sistema – the provision of instruments and musical teaching in hundreds of Venezuelan communities – to the stage of one of the most prestigious concert halls in Europe.
It was the almost seamless elision from a bongo-driven Latin American encore to the huge stirrings of Elgar’s Nimrod that rolled the collective tears down the cheeks of the thousands present. Dudamel’s control, energy, exuberance and discipline rendered the whole experience something altogether beyond the beyond.
I left feeling that, yet again, here was a potential route through recession – the return to a time when every local authority had a storehouse of musical instruments, and the potential for extending El Sistema from the four trials currently up and running in the UK to many hundreds. If Venezuela can, why can’t we?
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There are 4 comments on this post
Why can’t we? Because it’s not a question of ‘can’ but of ‘will’. And because Hugo Chavez didn’t waste all the public money on wars and inept bankers.
Check your facts f2point4…
“El Sistema” was founded by Jose Antonio Abreu in 1975. The only credit Chavez deserves on this one is to continue the support that previous Venezuelan governments had given to Dr. Abreu’s effort. So… ok, three cheers to Chavez not killing ONE good thing about his country.
There’s something about this country that makes us do so many things half cock. We so often seem to compromise and accept good enough rather than excellent and as f2point4 says, we spend shed loads of money on being a world power but not enough on being a great nation.
Outstanding musicianship and an astonishing ability to communicate and connect with the audience – the most stunning orchestral performance I’ve ever experienced. Saturday night’s concert was the culmination of an incredible week which has indeed challenged us in the UK to ask ‘why can’t we do that?’
As a music educator who’s worked for many years with disadvantaged young people I suggest:
- music education costs – the middle and upper classes afford it – hence their overwhelming dominance of the classical music scene;
- we’re not prepared to fund ‘others’ who can’t afford it – even LA music services only provided for a few and were monopolised by the middle classes;
- we justify not funding it by saying the working class / poor aren’t interested in culture anyway (witness Portillo on Newsnight Review Friday evening);
- we’re not concerned enough about addressing inequality on a structural level (we just get a little bit angry at bankers’ pensions etc).
Small-scale projects are great – but tinkering at the edges, I feel.