There are 4,000 Venezuelans in Britain. I don't know if all of them were in the queue for Gustavo Dudamel and his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra's Prom, but it looked like it.
At its head, the prommers who had queued since morning wore smiles across tired faces; at its tail round the corner, smiles were thinner, twitching as the hour of no hope approached. As for the ones who bought their seats back on 7 May, when tickets sold out in hours, the smile was definitely smug.
This was the orchestra's second visit to the Proms. Much has changed since 2007, when the words "el sistema" rippled across the lips of a nation shocked to remember the self-evident truth that a youth educated in music are a youth ennobled and given hope. And if the Simón Bolívars are no longer officially a youth orchestra – the average age having risen to 24 – they still play with an energy and focused desperation that comes only from feeling your life, rather than your pension, depends on your music-making.
It is appropriate that their second visit should be for Mahler's Second Symphony. Not because the work is about the second coming, but because it is rooted in the sublimated theatricality on which the orchestra thrives. The great fanfares in the brass, the swirling colours of the strings – Mahler's extended palette of grand gestures demand immense skill and discipline to come off cleanly, and the Bolívars have both in spades.
At the same time, the symphony inverts its theatricality in offering an anatomy of sensibility. There may be emotions that remain outside the symphony's spectrum, but not many. Certainly by the end, when the superb National Youth Choir of Great Britain and the two resplendent Swedish soloists Miah Persson and Anna Larsson convinced the angels to let them through the pearly gates (or what remained after the percussion and brass finished battering them), any listener whose ears still functioned must have felt as if they've heard it all. I certainly did.
At the centre of this whirlwind, of course, was Dudamel, whose talents grew with this orchestra, were honed by the Gothenburg Symphony, and are being tested by the LA Phil. But his relationship with the Bolivars is special. Conducting from memory and less concerned with pushing boundaries in interpretation than with simply getting the best out of his players, he inhabits both score and orchestra, offering a seamless conduit between the two.
At its head, the prommers who had queued since morning wore smiles across tired faces; at its tail round the corner, smiles were thinner, twitching as the hour of no hope approached. As for the ones who bought their seats back on 7 May, when tickets sold out in hours, the smile was definitely smug.
This was the orchestra's second visit to the Proms. Much has changed since 2007, when the words "el sistema" rippled across the lips of a nation shocked to remember the self-evident truth that a youth educated in music are a youth ennobled and given hope. And if the Simón Bolívars are no longer officially a youth orchestra – the average age having risen to 24 – they still play with an energy and focused desperation that comes only from feeling your life, rather than your pension, depends on your music-making.
It is appropriate that their second visit should be for Mahler's Second Symphony. Not because the work is about the second coming, but because it is rooted in the sublimated theatricality on which the orchestra thrives. The great fanfares in the brass, the swirling colours of the strings – Mahler's extended palette of grand gestures demand immense skill and discipline to come off cleanly, and the Bolívars have both in spades.
At the centre of this whirlwind, of course, was Dudamel, whose talents grew with this orchestra, were honed by the Gothenburg Symphony, and are being tested by the LA Phil. But his relationship with the Bolivars is special. Conducting from memory and less concerned with pushing boundaries in interpretation than with simply getting the best out of his players, he inhabits both score and orchestra, offering a seamless conduit between the two.
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