Musical movement tackles poverty – The Chilingirian String Quartet – Kings Place
They regularly top the bill at York Way’s Kings Place concert venue, but last week the Chilingirian String Quartet performed far from their London base.
As part of their long-running association with El Sistema, a Venezuelan network of youth orchestras credited with pulling hundreds of thousands of slum children out of poverty, the Quartet gave concerts and laid on master classes in the country’s capital, Caracas.
El Sistema, which translates as The System, was founded in 1975 by the virtuoso economist José Antonio Abreu, who took children from the poorest backgrounds and turned them into world-class musicians via state-funded “total immersion” in the Western classical canon.
His project, at first glance hopelessly idealistic, is widely regarded as having saved countless children from a life of crime and drug abuse.
Speaking from his hotel room in Caracas, Levon Chilingirian, first violinist in the Chilingirian Quartet, said El Sistema had gone from strength to strength under the ten regimes that have been in power in Venezuela since 1975.
“This orchestra has been in place for the last 30 years,” he said. “All sorts of political parties have been in power in that time, but El Sistema is independent of them. The present regime is very supportive, but then so were previous regimes.”
The El Sistema model, which has been exported to other South American countries, last year arrived to Britain, with Stirling, Lambeth and West Everton chosen as pilot areas.
Its social approach – children learn in groups rather than alone – inspired Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said’s West-Eastern Divan orchestra, in which Israeli, Arab and Iranian musicians play music together.
Chilingirian, an Armenian immigrant and professor at the Royal College of Music in South Kensington, said he hoped El Sistema would branch out to other parts of the world and expand its links with the UK.
He said: “We visited Venezuela a year ago and saw the immense talent of young people in El Sistema who are trying to develop their chamber music. Subsequently, Maestro Abreu invited us to introduce and take charge of the chamber music of 11 students.
“We have invited the best quartet in El Sistema, the Millennium Quartet, to come to our summer course at West Dean college. They will also be performing in the summer festival at Kings Place, when there will be 100 concerts to celebrate the venue.”
JOSH LOEB
• The Chilingirian String Quartet are playing at Kings Place on February 14 and at the Royal College of Music in a Schubert Festival, April 23-25