Word: bolivars
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...city's beating heart is La Candelaria - the 400-year-old Spanish colonial core, located just off of the grand, European-style Plaza Bolivar. Not so long ago, this was a frequent battleground between FARC guerrillas and Colombian security forces - but thanks to effective security measures, the violence has given way to new hotels, cafés and galleries, including the Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez, www.fce.com.co, a Modernist library and exhibition space named after the country's literary giant. (See pictures of the FARC guerrillas...
...Both sides, thankfully, are smart enough to know that the only man who can take credit for the Simon Bolivar is José Abreu, 69, an economist turned classical-music maestro who saw, or heard, in the urban ranchos (slums) and rural outposts of Venezuela the raw material of virtuosos. Like anyone who has spent time in Caracas ranchos such as Catia or San Agustin, Abreu "perceived amidst the poverty an immense musical talent, the facility for elegant and forceful rhythms," he told TIME in an interview over the weekend. Listening to youths play contrapunto on the small, four-stringed...
...right. In 1975 he and those teens and even preteens formed the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. It not only became a path out of the ranchos, it engendered a network of more than 100 similar youth orchestras around Venezuela that has come to be known simply as El Sistema (The System). It has served some half a million kids since the 1970s and is undoubtedly one of the most successful music-education projects of its kind in the world, emulated today as far away as Scotland. It has also produced its own international superstar: conductor Gustavo Dudamel...
...member Simon Bolivar, which played Friday in Houston and will perform in Chicago on April 10, is often credited with renewing, if not recreating, the spirit of classical music today. Whether or not it's the world's best youth orchestra (many European music writers say it's still not up to the likes of Germany's Junge Deutsche Philharmonie), few are as vibrant, as it showed in its rousing Carnegie Hall debut in 2007. Abreu describes its core personality as "energy, passion, virtuosity," a "primordial, ardent Latin vitality combined with a high level of technical rigor." The orchestra almost...
...Abreu won't say whether he thinks sharing the Simon Bolivar with the U.S. can improve Caracas-Washington relations, which are at their lowest point these days. (Neither country currently has an ambassador in the other.) But he does believe that the orchestra "can't help but promote understanding, not just between the U.S. and Venezuela but the New World and Europe," where the Simon Bolivar will travel next week. Even if these kids can't change the political understanding between the U.S. and Chávez - and who would want to saddle them with such a thankless task...