“With an orchestra you are building citizens, better citizens for the c...” — Gustavo Dudamel Quote

With an orchestra you are building citizens, better citizens for the community.

For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.

It's a physical challenge. It's a spiritual challenge. I'm studying almost every day a different symphony, not returning to any one for a week.

Classical music in Venezuela is now something like a pop concert. You can see people screaming or crying because they don't have a ticket.

I think that before you take on nation building in your mind's eye as to how it should be, you'd better have a clear understanding if this is doable and will work.

You can use your real identity, or you can use phone numbers for something like WhatsApp, and pseudonyms for something like Instagram. But in any of those you're not just sharing and consuming content, you are also building relationships with people and building an understanding of people.

I don't remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.

I smuggled the camera, it was no problem to smuggle the camera there. And I took 60 photos, two films, during the time when there was no one in the control room, in the building.