Word: orchestras
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...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...
...That future's flagship is the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, which is playing three sold-out concerts in the U.S. this week, including one at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Monday night. It's a chance for American audiences to take in a glorious slice of Venezuela that hasn't been politicized on either side of the Caribbean. Although his government has funded and promoted the Simon Bolivar to a much greater extent than its predecessors, President Chávez has largely refrained from brandishing the orchestra as a propaganda tool of his "21st-century socialism...
...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...
...spirit of defiance not unfamiliar in Jenin, however, the indominable orchestra conductor is fighting back. Younis is demanding that President Abbas lift the ban on her teaching music in Jenin. "This is the only music center in all the West Bank, and what have the Palestinian Authorities given me? Nothing. Not a single violin." Younis vows to keep her youth orchestra going, somehow. She concludes an interview with a question of her own: "You don't know where I could get a saxophone...
...what about that glorious score? Well, this time around, it doesn't sound all that glorious. I count 28 musicians listed in the program, but the orchestra sounded both undermanned and overmiked, sometimes drowning out the singers; in a couple of the early numbers, I couldn't be entirely certain they were working from the same sheet music. What's more - a heresy to even suggest - I wonder if this score really belongs in the very top rank of American musicals. The jazzy, modernist, Gershwinesque rhythms of some of Bernstein's music - "The Jet Song," "America" - are still striking...