Tocar y Luchar

I spent the whole night watching this amazing eight-part documentary To Play and To Fight about the Orquesta Juvenil Simon Bolivar de Venezuela (the current Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela). It is in Spanish, but I understood enough. Also the images spoke for themselves. Nobody knew what was happening in Venezuela, until this youth orchestra stepped on the world stage and blew everyone away. They take on the most demanding scores in the repertory: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Shostakovich. My jaw literally dropped when I heard them play a personal favourite-- Gustav Mahler's Resurrection Symphony and a complicated one, the Shostakovich 10th. And what a performance it was.

The music they create sounds different even when compared to the best professional orchestras in the world, i.e. Berlin and Vienna. Maybe because these kids, many of whom come from "depressed" areas, have nothing but their music to hold on to. They mean every note they play, not just somersault over it. And it is to their credit they sound better than more professional orchestras who mechanically go through the musical scores. The sincerity comes through the listeners quite clearly.

Abaddo, Rattle, and the late Sinopoli-- first rate conductors who all held the baton of Berlin and Vienna, along with Placido Domingo, all flew in to Caracas to see and experience for themselves this amazing phenomenon.

The unforgettable images are indelibly inked in my mind: the blind kid who plays the trumpet; a young girl practicing Bach near the rooftops of a slum area; a young boy playing cello under a tree; a young trumpeter blowing his instrument in a parked "banca" along the seashore; and a concert in a small but packed chapel in what appears like a small, sleepy town.

Jose Antonio Abreu founded and pioneered the musical teaching system in Venezuela known as "El Sistema", which offers free music lessons and instruments to poor children. The scheme began in 1975, with the belief that music could act as a force for social cohesion in a country with such a wide gap between rich and poor.

The rest of the world can only marvel at the program's success. It has opened countless doors to under-privileged young people and gave them good chances at a better life.

As Berlin Philharmonic's Simon Rattle aptly puts it, "music not only enriches, but also saves lives."