Even before they played their first note together, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra were listed as one of the world’s most inspiring orchestras.
Part publicity stunt by its producers, part vanity trip by its participants, part opportunity to attract a younger crowd to classical music, the orchestra made its much anticipated debut last night at Carnegie Hall in New York.
In the four months since the project was announced, more than 3,000 videos submitted by amateur and professional musicians from 70-plus countries were auditioned.
Voters among the 15 million viewers of www.YouTube.com/Symphony selected the 93 winners, who ranged from ages 15 to 55 and included a surgeon-violinist and a professional poker player-cellist.
“We’re meeting a lot of different worlds,” conductor Michael Tilson Thomas told the audience before the first downbeat, “the real time world, the online world and the experience of getting acquainted. For us it’s been something between a classical music summit conference (and) scout jamboree combined with speed dating.”
