Venezuela
David Nice
Venezuela's joyful musical education programme known as El Sistema is the phenomenon of the age, the success story that many western countries now seek to replicate. And that's great. But Britain, for a start, might re-engage its own back-to-basics in music quicker by looking closer to home and seeing how Finland does it. In a small population, every child has free access to an instrument until secondary school. So there's clearly a link between the plethora of outstanding classically trained musicians constantly emerging from Finland and a primary-school opera based on the life of Vincent Read more ...
David Nice
Glaciers melted early this year when a Venezuelan army of well over 100 generals arrived in central Switzerland. The Swiss spring coincided with their visit, a gentle thaw with bees buzzing confusedly around the primroses, snowdrops and winter jasmine; but the first appearance of the now stellar Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela at the Lucerne Easter Festival was more like the violent icebreak Stravinsky said he had in mind for The Rite of Spring. It was, however, a lurid spin-off from the Stravinsky Rite, Prokofiev's Scythian Suite, with which they set the Swiss ablaze. Under the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week the BBC News online magazine is running a Portrait of the Decade. Each day has brought a consideration of the words, the events, the people, the objects and, today, the cultural highlights of the decade. I was invited to consider those highlights.In years to come, when they look back on the culture of the Noughties, no one will struggle to identify the overarching theme. This has been the decade in which the professional, the trained talent, has had to budge up and make room. A decade ago, who’d have imagined that the biggest stars in pop would be sourced from a Saturday-night Read more ...