Last night we went to the BBC Proms, the biggest (and oldest?) music festival in the world. The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venzuela was playing Shostakovich and a collection of wonderful Latin American pieces.
The orchestra consists of over 200 young musicians, aged 12 to 26, and was founded to take poor kids out of the slums, gangs and drug scenes and and give them a purpose in life. 250,000 musicians now benefit and can participate in master classes and work with international conductors including Sir Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado.
The concert was sensational. Not only was the musicianship excellent, but the sheer exuberance and sense of fun of the young people was extraordinary, and carried the audience away and into extraordinary fervor. The lights dimmed and when they brightened the players had all put on Venezuelan jackets in the national colors, which at the end of the concert they threw to the audience. We caught 2 jackets, which we wore home.
Sounds zany and showy? Yes, but it caught the imagination of the crowd and did more for classical music than ten ordinary concerts.
The point? The orchestra is funded by the government, much maligned by the grim foreign policy establishment in the US. Here is a government actually given hope to the hope-less. In decades of oil revenues the small number of people who benefited did little or nothing for the bulk of the population. Greed ruled. As an aspiring Epicurean my ataraxia level jumped last night. Hope and exhilaration assist in peace of mind and happiness.
What a cheering review of the Proms concert and a reminder that governments can do good. Simply put, eh? One of the most destructive attitudes that the likes of Reagan pushed in the U.S. was that government was loathsome and to be dismantled as far as possible. Political self-hatred, if you will.
It’s a pleasure to visualize the young musicians, revelling in their work, the public camaraderie of the event and, of course, above all — catching a jacket!! No wonder you enjoyed a jolt of ataraxia.
I actually found the concert so exciting I had tears in my eyes. For encores, the orchestra did a wave and then danced around holding their instruments high. For all their antics though, they played beautifully. The Evening Standard gave them a 5 star review.Leonard Slatkin, each your heart out. The young conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, is extremely talented and at 26 has just been named music director for the LA orchestra.