Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and Dudamel celebrate Venezuela's El Sistema

This was the second of two concerts celebrating the 50th anniversary of El Sistema, Venezuela’s innovative musical education initiative. Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela – the musicians all products of El Sistema – opened with recent music by Venezuelan composers. Ricardo Lorenz (b.1961) enjoys the outback of his country, finding such exploration a “compelling metaphor for life”. That would be an exaggerated description of his nine-minute Todo Terreno (All Terrain). A large percussion section was deployed melodically from the start, and soon the large string section (18, 16, 14, 14, 10) was active too. The tempo was fast, the manner headlong, and everyone seemed to be playing, producing a dense busy texture. But about seven minutes in the tumult eased, the music broadened – a lyrical pause to look at the spectacular surroundings – before a dash to return home.

The one-movement concerto Odisea by Gonzalo Grau (b.1952) was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for tonight’s performers, LA Phil Chief Conductor Dudamel, and the cuatro player Jorge Glem. Grau say that his piece imagines soloist Glem leaving his hometown, Cumaná, on the eastern coast of Venezeula, and travelling to meet conductor Dudamel in his home town Barquisimeto, in the country’s heartlands. A cuatro is a small four-stringed Latin American instrument, heir to the Renaissance guitar, and is usually heard in cuatro ensembles. Solo it may be soft-voiced, for in the Barbican it was amplified. Glem, here white-hatted like a street performer in the Venezuelan sun, is its pre-eminent practitioner and champion.

Grau’s 22-minute movement is often driven through its varied episodes (or places along the journey) by the conga-like golpe drum, whose beat begins as if from afar, getting closer as the work nears its end. The cuatro is often a cantabile collaborator with the orchestra’s varied types of music, sometimes gently reflective or dancing – there is little Homeric about this odyssey. As if the concerto could not do justice to the cuatro’s range, Glem’s encore, his own Pajarillo, left no doubt. A tour d’horizon of European music, some Spanish but not excluding such unlikely bedfellows as the O fortuna opening to Orff’s Carmina Burana, and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, it received a performance of astounding virtuosity.

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony was begun in 1877 soon after the collapse of his disastrous nine-week marriage and attempted suicide. As he told his patron Nadezhda von Meck, the work was – understandably – dominated by the idea of Fate, represented by the opening motto on eight horns. The composer requires just four horns, but this was a thrilling fanfare, launching a fast and desperate struggle with a malign destiny. The pathos of the slow movement might have emerged more with a steadier tempo, but oboist Joseph González’s opening solo was immaculate. Laying down their bows for the Scherzo, those 72 strings showed how precise and nimble they can be in such a swift pizzicato piece. They were barely given time to pick up their bows again before we were hurled into the raucous opening of the finale, the return of the opening fate motto a baleful recall of the composer’s travails in a symphony he found so hard to write. There is an afflicted soul at the heart of this work which Dudamel’s fast tempi never quite reached, but that did not dampen the roar recognising these musicians’ passionate energy.

The encores were Arturo Márquez’s Danzón no. 9, filled with high-stepping Latin American rhythms, and a tribute from North to South America in the Mambo from Bernstein’s West Side Story.