On Friday (2/13), the Los Angeles Times’ ongoing “Inside the L.A. Philharmonic” series reports on the Philharmonic’s Youth Orchestra Los Angeles program. Jeffrey Fleishman writes, “Vivian Trejo practices the French horn above a row of bodegas on a broken street. She opens her score sheet. A boy hollers in the alley, a plane skims the haze beyond her window. She presses her lips to a silver mouthpiece, blows through coiled steel and imagines, depending on the music, walking in a field or wandering through a war. ‘Music lets you escape,’ said Vivian, 13, who lives with her Guatemalan-born parents in a small apartment west of downtown L.A.… A member of the young musicians program knows as Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, or YOLA, she embodies the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s most significant attempt to reach younger, more diverse audiences in a county that is about 50% Latino. The program offers free instruments and years of musical training to mostly underprivileged children, with the aim that it will help them achieve success, and that many may eventually become supporters of classical music.… More than 700 students are enrolled and 400 are on waiting lists.” The article includes profiles of several YOLA musicians.
Posted February 18, 2015
