Julian Lloyd Webber celebrates Venezuela's social and cultural miracle - El Sistema BBC Proms 2007 homepage
A 12-year-old boy is on the streets, hanging out in derelict tenement blocks next to a motorway. At 13, he's hooked on crack cocaine, carrying a gun and stealing and dealing to pay for his habit… It's an all-too-familiar scenario in every British city. | |  | | Success story: the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra |
Except Legner Lacosta was handed a lifeline currently unavailable to any British child because he hails from Caracas, Venezuela - the country where a social miracle has occurred that should be serving as the prototype for any country (eg Britain) chock-full of youths alienated by the cultural and spiritual bankruptcy they find all around them. El Sistema is the visionary answer introduced to Venezuela 30 years ago by José Abreu, an economist and classical music enthusiast who believed that every poverty-stricken child should have free access to classical music and that their lives would be transformed as a result. Persevering against seemingly impossible odds, Abreu has been proved triumphantly right, with more than 270,000 Venezuelan children now clamouring to be part of his scheme. Proof of its success is provided by the sensational Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, whose appearances last month at the Edinburgh Festival and the Proms were, quite simply, miraculous. Such adjectives are bandied about so often in the classical music world that they have lost their true meaning, but miraculous is the only possible word to describe performances that reached the highest professional standards, given by teenagers from a country which - before El Sistema - had no meaningful tradition of classical music. One man's dream has ensured that Venezuela is not only the first South American country to play classical music better than football but that its youth orchestra is the finest advertisement any country could wish for. To experience an ensemble of teenagers who have themselves been through grief play the monumental Tenth Symphony by Shostakovich - the 20th-century composer who suffered more grief than any other at the hands of the Soviet government - with such raw passion and technical mastery was a deeply moving experience. By the end of the concert even hardened critics were leaping to their feet along with the rest of the audience. Yet, while Britain's politicians and tabloid editors vie with each other to produce knee-jerk reactions and quick-fix solutions to our moral malaise, the most important aspect of El Sistema is that it is literally saving children's lives. Every one of them has a story to tell. "I'd either be dead or still living on the streets smoking crack like when I was eight," said a french horn player. "I'd be like the other 17-year-old girls in the barrio - hanging with the gangs and pregnant," said a violinist. "Joining the orchestra changed not only my life but my whole family's. My father was drinking far too much, and my brothers had dropped out of school. When I got hooked on my instrument, my father stopped drinking and, one by one, my brothers went back to school," said a trumpeter. Amazingly, there was a smattering of politicians (if not tabloid editors) at the two concerts - not least in Edinburgh, where the Scottish Culture Secretary was sitting alongside the Scottish Arts Council chief because Scotland has already shown it is ahead of the game by trying out a pilot scheme based on El Sistema on Stirling's troubled Raploch housing estate. Yet, encouraging as this is, it is only tinkering with the problem of our seriously disaffected youth. Wouldn't it be marvellous if some big organisation - for example, one of those same tabloids that delight in lurid headlines such as "Anarchy!" and revelations about the sex lives of Big Brother participants - decided to back a scheme like this and make a real difference to our children's lives? Any takers? |