Star conductor Rafael Payare on escaping poverty and the abuse allegations facing El Sistema

Rafael Payare first played the horn at 14, thanks to Venezuela's El Sistema schools
Rafael Payare first played the horn at 14, thanks to Venezuela's El Sistema schools - Benjamin Ealovega

Not so long ago, becoming a world-beating classical musician required study at a historic conservatoire in either Vienna, London or New York.  Now that classical music has become global, there are new routes to the top.

So far none has been more spectacularly successful than Venezuela’s regional network of music schools and youth orchestras known as El Sistema. The ‘system’ claims to have rescued thousands of children from a potential life of crime on the streets, most notably Gustavo Dudamel, probably the best-known conductor on the planet, who now leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Fast catching up with Dudamel is conductor Rafael Payare, who, like Dudamel, began his career in El Sistema’s regional nuclei – or schools. Born to a cartographer and primary school teacher in the coastal town of Puerto la Cruz, Payare first became aware of music aged 14, when his brother – who played in the orchestra of the nucleo – played a CD that included Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Little Payare was seized by the “wonderful brassy sound” of the French horn.

Payare accompanied his brother to a rehearsal, where a brass teacher put a horn in his hand. “It made a sound straight away and I thought yes, this is the instrument for me,” says Payare, now 42, with a strong Venezuelan accent. “Three weeks later I joined the orchestra.”

Soon, Payare was playing principal horn in El Sistema’s flagship Children’s Orchestra in Caracas, later graduating to the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, with which he performed at the Proms and elsewhere. In a full circle moment, this weekend he conducts the same orchestra at Edinburgh International Festival.

Children playing their instruments in Caracas, where El Sistema was founded in 1975
Children playing their instruments in Caracas, where El Sistema was founded in 1975 - AFP

It’s a heart-warming story, and yet El Sistema has fallen under a cloud since a 2014 book by British sociologist Geoffrey Baker revealed widespread bullying and sexual harassment, since when numerous ex-players have come forward with their own stories of abuse. And many claim that, hardly a saviour of the working class, El Sistema’s orchestras are now mostly middle-class children.

Payare, however, says his household was “quite poor. We only had a CD player in the house because my brother won a scholarship. And I know some players who were poorer than me. When I moved to Caracas, I had a wonderful flatmate who became my friend – he was an absolutely brilliant tuba player. But he was so poor, they had a dirt floor. He told me when he returned home after some time away many of his old friends were now in gaol.”

As for bullying and sexual favours, Payare says he never witnessed anything of that kind. “That’s not how it worked.  We all wanted to do better, so we would have a chance of being given a solo in the next concert. And if another horn player got a chance, I would be happy for that person. Everything was based on hard work and merit.”

It was when the Italian conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli came to conduct the Symphony Orchestra that the young Payare had a realisation. “We had been rehearsing the overture of Wagner’s Rienzi, and then Sinopoli came on the podium, and by changing one or two tempos and the balance of sound, he made everything sound wonderful. It was like magic. I thought, one day I would like to do that.”

Payare persuaded the orchestral manager to let him conduct a few sectional rehearsals, and his talent came to the attention of José Abreu, the one-time Cultural Minister of Venezuela and founder of El Sistema. “He really believed in me, he told me, ‘some people are a natural-born talent, and you are one of those.’ But he saw I really needed a proper musical education, which he organised for me.”

It must have been a thorough training because Payare has never attended a conservatoire, though he admits to spending all his free hours on tour learning his new craft. “I would go to all of Maestro Claudio Abbado’s rehearsals with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and when I was in Berlin I would sit in on Maestro Daniel Barenboim’s rehearsals with the State Opera.”  The old-fashioned word “maestro” (master) often has an ironic ring in the mouth of a European, but Payare means it sincerely.

With all that native talent allied to unremitting hard work over 18 years, it’s not so surprising that Payare won the Malko conducting competition in 2012, though he says his only aim was to survive the first round, “because then the organisers would have to pay my airfare home!”

Now, just over a decade later, living in Berlin with his wife the cellist Alisa Weilerstein and their two sons, he’s become the archetypal international conductor, polyglot, at ease anywhere. But he says he will always be loyal to El Sistema, and keep a professional connection to it. “It gave me a training, an education, a community – everything. If it were not for El Sistema I would not be where I am now.”


The Simón Bolívar Orchestra appears at the Edinburgh International Festival on 24 and 26 August eif.co.uk