Called El Sistema by its members, the programme is celebrating 30 years of making classical musicians out of half-a-million young Venezuelans, and it has transformed the lives of many underprivileged and at-risk youths in the process.
"I wish players in the US were here to hear the conviction with which you play," Gwyn Richards, dean of Indiana University's School of Music, told a Caracas youth orchestra after it played Dmitri Shostakovich's Festive Overture in honour of his visit.
"No-one is just walking through it, watching the clock," he said later. "When they play, they really mean it."
 Visitors say the children play with unusual conviction |
The young musicians' excitement stems from the programme's social mission, which its founder Jose Antonio Abreu describes as helping "the fight of a poor and abandoned child against everything that opposes his full realisation as a human being".
One of Mr Abreu's musicians is Lennar Acosta, 23, who six years ago was already making his ninth visit to a Caracas correctional facility after a history of heavy drug use and armed robbery.
While the facility denied Mr Acosta's request to return to school, the youth orchestra took him on as a student and soon gave him a scholarship.
He now earns his living at a music institute, has played a dozen times in the nation's famed Teresa Carreno music hall, and is studying to perform Mozart's clarinet concerto.
"One of the biggest emotions I've felt was when they gave me a clarinet," Mr Acosta said, sitting with his instrument in hand in a Caracas music conservatory.
"El Sistema ended up straightening me out. It is my family, like my home."
To read more visit: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4457278.stm
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