Caracas Youth Orchestra A Zeneakadémia saját szervezésű programja

“There is nothing more important in the world of music than what is happening in Venezuela,” Sir Simon Rattle said a few years ago, commenting on the ‘El Sistema’ national classical music teaching network. Almost 400,000 children are studying European classical music on a daily basis in Venezuela. The key to the system developed by José Antonio Abreu in 1975 is participation in the orchestral community and social sensitivity: children, the overwhelming majority of whom come from extremely poor families, learn to play instruments. Of the more than 30 symphony orchestras in the system, the Caracas Youth Orchestra is one of the most important, and its leader, 34-year-old Dietrich Paredes, is one of the great finds of El Sistema, as is Edicson Ruiz, who at the age of nine worked as a shop-floor shelf stacker, while by his 17th birthday he was playing as a double bassist with the Berlin Philharmonic (he is the youngest double bassist in the history of the orchestra). Two works are performed in the first half: a popular orchestral piece by Mexican Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940), Sensemayá (1938), putting to music the Cuban snake-sacrifice ceremony designed to stimulate ancient energies, and one of the busiest Swedish composers of our day, Rolf Martinsson’s Double Bass Concerto No. 1 (2012), transcribed last year by the composer specially for Ruiz. After the intermission it is the turn of the grandiose piece of Camille Saint-Saëns, the 3rd, so-called Organ-symphony.