El Sistema alumnus Gustavo Dudamel and Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in a 2025 concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall. Photo by Sisi Burn/Pa’ Los Panas.
In Wednesday’s (2/18) WBEZ (Chicago), Hannah Edgar writes, “Before [trumpeter Pacho] Flores became an international soloist, and [conductor Giancarlo] Guerrero famous enough to score a cameo appearance in Bad Bunny’s ecstatic, pan-Latin halftime show, both men passed through the same organization: El Sistema Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela, or ‘El Sistema.’… ‘I owe basically my career to El Sistema and Venezuela,’ Guerrero, 56, told WBEZ … El Sistema alums are conspicuously well-represented in classical music institutions and conservatories. This fall, Venezuela-born conductor Gustavo Dudamel, 45, will take the reins of … the New York Philharmonic, while still acting as music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra. Fellow conductor Rafael Payare, who participated in El Sistema at the same time as Dudamel, leads the San Diego and Montréal symphonies. And Venezuelan musicians are members of some of the world’s best orchestras, from the Berlin Philharmonic to our own Chicago Symphony…. Amid a flashpoint in U.S.-Venezuela relations and ramped up domestic immigration enforcement, the future of that export has never been more in question. Last June, the State Department stopped issuing visas, including student visas, to Venezuelan nationals, with limited exceptions. Those exceptions were narrowed further in January. That spells uncertainty for Venezuelan musicians who might have otherwise moved to Chicago to pursue their career, whether at the city’s many top-tier conservatories or through early-career opportunities at the Chicago Symphony, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, or Grant Park Music Festival.”
