Simon says it is the most important thing happening in classical music in the world. "Simon" is Simon Rattle, music director of the Berlin Philharmonic. "It" is El Sistema, the youth orchestra program in Venezuela.
"It" might also describe the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, the cream of a 250,000-student crop, which began its first U.S. tour at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Thursday night under its music director, Gustavo Dudamel. And if this incredible orchestra hits San Francisco, Boston and New York with the same revelatory effect as at the first Disney concert, our country, with its poor music education, may never -- should never -- be the same.
Happily, the orchestra and Dudamel, who will become music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009, are hot properties. TV's "60 Minutes," which gave El Sistema its first big blast of publicity eight years ago, was on hand in L.A. to film a follow-up story on Dudamel, who at 26 is a spectacularly rising star worldwide. The Philharmonic has been under an international barrage of interview requests ever since its Easter surprise announcement of Dudamel's appointment.
Both Thursday's concert and another on Friday night had sold out quickly, and Internet ticket scalping had reached near Ian McKellen-like proportions. When an orchestra of 160 slowly filed onto the Disney stage Thursday, the applause grew and grew. When Dudamel walked out, he might have been a rock star. When the concert ended, he might have hit a home run to win the World Series.
The program -- Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story" and Mahler's mighty, 70-minute Fifth Symphony -- wasn't slight. Dudamel has ideas about these pieces, and they are mostly about how to make every incident in the scores either heart-stoppingly thrilling or heart-meltingly tender, how to shape a melodic line in the most comely fashion and how to coax a rhythmic phrase into dancing its way to every corner of a concert hall.
The stage was crammed full of youngsters, ages 12 to 26. Individually these are first-rate players (the horns alone would be the envy of many a brand-name band). But they also form an organism like no other. In furious passages, masses of string players swayed in their seats and wind players bobbed their heads as if guided by a single animating life force.
