This isn’t an album, and it isn’t a song. To me it is a hurricane landing on your soul. The concert streamed below was part of the TED 2009 conference, where the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra from Venezuela ballooned Shostakovich’s 10th symphony to it’s very limits, and then casually took on Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No. 2. The conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, who is now practically a global hero for the perpetual and unnecessary resurrection of classical music, conjurs up such emotion and activity that it is hard to imagine how any other orchestra could have been motivated to perform in the past. Many TED talks came together to change my life – I was in a hard place in 2008 and they gave me the food and wisdom to radically change direction, location, and perspective – but this concert, which appeared as the changes were bedding in, is the cement of it all.
If you can wake up in a house with little food, with little money, with little roof, with little health care or education, and then smile, pick up a violin and explode in such torrents of passion, energy, and happiness, then … well, I don’t know what to say. It’s beyond my comprehension – it is a level above my intellect, it is the impossible beauty that comes from tension and purity, something the Western world knows but forgets. I dare you not to feel your heart rumble rapturously during this performance.
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