Prom 2: Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela

Who were absolutely amazing (the BBC page on them). They got four encores and a standing ovation, and deserved them all. I got there too late for an arena seat, and ended up in the gallery, which was a happy chance: seeing a big orchestra from above you get a real sense of the physicality and movement of the players. The orchestra formed up in good time, and what I could see was an almost insectile series of the same movements (turning a page here, raising a bow there) repeated at random across the entire orchestra, my eye trying to follow or predict the twitches of movement. Then the conductor came on, and the orchestra formed itself into lines around him, structure coming out, the blackish mass of the violins and violas suddenly going amber as the instruments all lifted at once, and paused, and waited. It was almost a pure movement, one done because it's a side-effect of your purpose, and it got echoed after a moment, when they all came in together, every string player's hand and bow moving to the left and right together, hypnotically. Being down in the arena makes you aware of the crowd around you, but being up in the gallery makes you aware of the mood of the entire hall, and I think the sound quality is better, since you have a clear line of sight to every instrument. The sound quality was certainly much better than at Nitin Sawhney's Prom, which did get a bit muddy at times.

The first piece they played was Shostakovich's Tenth, and next time I go to a Prom I'll be buying a copy of the programme first thing, as it would really have helped to understand what was being played. It was being played wonderfully, though! The musicians are all young, all the product of a nation-wide system that since 1975 has taken tens of thousands of kids from the slums, and given them musical instruments and all the training they can take. The Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra then takes the best of these, and they've been making waves in classical circles for a couple of years. Gustavo Dudamel, the conductor, is 26, and I can't help feeling that the young orchestra fitted the work absolutely beautifully, really able to emote the themes of love and anger that run through the symphony. They did soft, they did loud, they did slow and fast, jagged and lyrical, and they got monstrous applause at the end of the first half, and the crowd brought the conductor back out to take applause three times, and applauded the soloists and the orchestra twice.

The second half was first of all parts of West Side Story, which I thought were good, but not as good as the other parts of the second half, especially when you could really hear the folk melodies or dance rhythms coming through the works of Moncayo, Arturo Marquez and Alberto Ginastera. And then the encores: two of them fairly normal (though do Prom audiences stamp quite so much for other conductors to come back on?) and then all the musicians stopped, put down their instruments, reached under their chairs, and put on their ponchos in the colour of the Venezuelan flag. That's when the encores started to get really crazy, with the concert harps nodding backwards and forwards to the music like oil derricks, the whole brass section doing the soul horns thing, pointing their instruments in different directions as they played, and the strings popping up out of their chairs when they played, and then popping back down when they weren't. And the whole orchestra playing a mambo, doing a freeze, yelling "Mambo!" and then carrying on, I'll remember that for a good long time! At the end, they all took their ponchos off and threw them into the audience, and I wished I'd been queuing since four o'clock in the afternoon to get a place at the front of the arena. All in all: storming!

Googling "proms simon.bolivar" gets you four torrent results on the first page....