On Thursday, Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel “publicly called on Venezuela’s president to ‘listen to the people’ and end the protest violence that has resulted in more than 29 deaths,” writes Mark Swed in Thursday’s (5/4) Los Angeles Times. “For years, Dudamel has attempted to remain above politics, despite [the] dramatically intensifying poverty and privations in his home country…. It was El Sistema that changed the maestro’s mind. On Wednesday a 17-year-old violist from one of the El Sistema youth orchestras was killed during a demonstration in Caracas. In a matter of hours Dudamel … issued a statement titled ‘I Raise My Voice’ in which he deplored the violence and repression of the current regime and declared: ‘Enough is enough.’ … In a wide-ranging conversation in his Disney Hall office a few days earlier, Dudamel [said], ‘My position hasn’t changed…. But the crisis [in Venezuela] is true…. It’s not right for people to be dying in demonstrations.’ … Dudamel still clearly wants to keep El Sistema out of partisan politics…. ‘El Sistema,’ he notes, ‘has withstood many political crises. Politically and economically, the ’80s were not good. The ’90s were not good. And we have grown only stronger.’ ”
Posted May 5, 2017
Pictured: Gustavo Dudamel with the Youth Orchestra of L.A. (YOLA), which he created following the model of Venezuela’s El Sistema program. Photo by Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times
