Victory for Venezuela - Gustavo Dudamel leads Simon Bolivar Orchestra to a knockout win

Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar / Dudamel - Royal Festival Hall, 18 April 2009

This, the last concert in the Simón Bolívar Orchestra's South Bank residency, was by far the hottest ticket in town - sold out for months, and tickets going for hundreds on Ebay. Tan Dun was apparently being denied a VIP comp as I went in, on the grounds that there simply weren't any seats left. Those lucky enough to snag a ticket were as mixed a bunch as you'd find anywhere. Youngsters, oldsters, MPs, Essex princesses, Russian robber barons and their collagen-gobbed molls, American exchange students, Viktoria Mullova, ladies who lunch, lads who drink.

But the most important guest, sitting bang in the centre of the stalls, was José Antonio Abreu, the tiny, fragile, saintly-looking founder of El Sistema, who quite rightly received a standing ovation before the concert began. Amidst all the point-missing press, it's easy to forget that the Venezuelan project is not about training musicians or even nurturing individual musical talent but about changing the lives of the most deprived children. If practising four hours a day six days a week happens to turn them into great performers, that's just a welcome side effect.

The programme played to their strengths, with a first half of three short Latin American works - the robustly rhythmic Sensemaya by Silvestre Revueltas, Antonio Estevez's dreamy, impressionistic Mediodia en el llano and the most identifiably Venezuelan of them all, Santa Cruz de Pacairigua by Evencio Castellanos.

If every performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was as raw and visceral as this one, there'd be a riot every time it was played. It was not subtle, the bursts of brutal frenetic energy played out at maximum volume. What it displayed was how brilliantly the orchestra work together. Like their opening Tchaikovsky symphony last week, this is an intricately-interwoven work in which none of the individual parts taken in isolation really make sense, so it needs what it got - an orchestra who can play together as one, attuned and responsive to each other.

Encores, of course there were encores! Starting with Batuque by Oscar Lorenzo Fernândez, a mad dance that spins faster and faster and faster - but never quite out of control - until it collapses in a heap.

Elgar's Nimrod variation was the surprise second encore - beautifully played, absolutely straight, with repeats. An enormously touching tribute to their temporarily-adopted city.

There was a brief blackout while the orchestra swapped their dark jackets for the bright bombers stashed under their chairs, and then a reprise of the Ginastera and Bernstein encores from Tuesday's performance. Only this time even crazier, with violinists dancing on chairs while they played, horns spinning and who knows what tossed high in the air and deftly recaptured.

The audience went insane, with loads rushing down to the front. Was it just to try and nab one of the Venezuela jackets and caps that the orchestra were ripping off and tossing into the crowd? Or was it years of pent-up classical-going frustration - no talking, no coughing, no clapping till it's over - finally being allowed to manifest itself?