This August, the renowned Lucerne Summer Festival hosted the first of at least three summer camps, with young musicians and teachers of Sistema Europe programmes from across the continent.
Organised by Superar Suisse and led by El Sistema Founding Member Ulysses Ascanio and a team of 24 tutors from participating programmes, the Superar Suisse & Friends Orchestra Camp brought together children and young adults from Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Portugal and England for a week of rehearsing which culminated in a grand performance in the KKL Concert Hall on the 18th August.
Watch the camp rehearse the 4th Movement from Beethoven's Symphony No. 5
Click here if you cannot see/hear the video.
The camp’s initiator, Superar Suisse, was itself strongly represented with 31 children from Basel, Lugano and Zürich and under its guiding hand, the camp ensured the manifestation of the festival’s 2018 theme of childhood.
Active in five centres across Switzerland, Superar Suisse fully embodies Sistema values, only working in schools with 50% + children of non-Swiss backgrounds and providing free tuition and access to orchestral music playing for children who would otherwise be unlikely to encounter this particular field of the arts.
In an interview with Roman Kühne of the Luzerner Zeitung, Superar Suisse’s artistic director, Marco Castellini, spoke about the organisation’s Sistema roots, explaining how they had gained their inspiration from Gerald Wirth’s reintegration of singing into the curriculum of Viennese schools and how Mr Wirth had himself been inspired by his encounters with El Sistema in Venezuela.
Talking about the Sistema approach, Mr Castellini also emphasised the importance of group learning, talking about its gradual acceptance in Switzerland with Susanne Kübler of the Tagesanzeiger and further underlining its pedagogical benefits in discussion with Mr Kühne:
This focus on the 1-1 teacher-pupil relationship has been out-of-date for 30-40 years. Group learning, in which the pupils play and perform pieces, is much more effective. The children enjoy themselves much more and are quicker to learn how to take on responsibility [for their progress]. This massively improves their sense of self-esteem. It’s a miracle what has been achieved here, in some cases, in just a few years…We are quick to integrate children into their ensembles and, usually, they are then able to perform their first concerts just a few months later. That is an incredible incentive, even if they can only play three notes.
Photos of the summer camp
All photos courtesy of Superar Suisse
Use the arrows to scan the gallery
As a product of the first ever El Sistema orchestra, the week’s conductor, Ulysses Ascanio, was well-placed to back up Mr Castellini, having experienced first-hand how a group of Venezuelan children developed into a worldwide musical phenomenon under the inspirational group tuition of José Antonio Abreu.
In conversation with the Lucerne Festival Blog, Ulysses Ascanio also spoke of the other benefits of orchestral music tuition, emphasising how all children possess a “common place”, where “…dignity, purity, creativity, hope, light, dreams, imagination artistic sensibility and the possibility of an immeasurable future…” can be found. For Ascanio, finding this “common place” is the key that enables him and other tutors to successfully teach orchestral groups and he was clear that, once this step has been achieved, the orchestra can be a vessel for mutual understanding and harmony across whatever boundaries may otherwise divide us:
If we possess the humanity and the firm conviction to reach it, then we succeed in bringing about a creative encounter which changes something. I believe that, in relation to this, our cultures, our backgrounds, our different languages and customs, these all play a secondary role, if we can succeed in connecting with this “common place”.
And, the performances in Lucerne certainly suggest that Ascanio and his team succeeded. Following just a week’s worth of common rehearsals, children and young people of 26 nationalities, aged 10-20, took to the KKL stage on 18th August to perform a complex repertoire of Beethoven, Brahms, Rossini, Shostakovich and Strauss to rousing applause from the audience.
Join the Lucerne Festival looking back at 2018’s Superar & Friends Orchestra Camp
Click here if you cannot see/hear the video.
We wish the camp as much success off as on stage, as Superar Suisse, the Lucerne Festival and the Hilti Foundation look to develop the programme in the coming years, with the establishment of long-term fixtures in both the city and the festival programme on the cards moving forwards.
Having issues playing the Facebook videos?
Depending on your settings, embedded videos from Facebook may be muted and/or invisible. If you can't hear any sound, then click on the speaker icon at the bottom right of the video. If you cannot see the video and are using Firefox, then temporarily disable tracking protection by clicking on the shield to the left of this page's URL address (at the top of the page).