Land of hope and glory - Bolivarian Music

The Jose Marti Bolivarian School, in the barrio of Sarria in Caracas, is ringing with music. In the school hall, string players, most aged about eight, are pounding away with cast-iron technique at some Beethoven. Through a thickly tropical, dusty garden, a hesitant pom-pom-pomming incongruously reveals itself as the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel - a young tuba player is having a lesson in a corridor. In the gymnasium, sunshine fluttering in through gashes in the roof, 11-year-old Paola Chistoni is being coached. "My trompetita, little trumpeter," says Rafael Elster, director of the school's music, pride in his voice.

When he dispassionately explains the violent realities of the barrio that lies beyond the firmly locked school gates, Elster seems to be describing a different world from that of these cheerful, focused children. We are in one of Caracas's seemingly endless drifts of fragile-looking shacks and ad-hoc homes, which creep out from the central urban sprawl to colonise any space they can, merging with the wooded mountains that circle the city. "Two weeks ago, a mother took three bullets in the chest. Four or five of the mothers of kids here have been shot; a lot of the kids are orphans," he says. "There's a lot of gang fighting - but the police are as bad, if not worse. They come in shooting. Last time, they shot a couple of kids. People have killed to get a space to build a shack alongside the river just over there." He gestures beyond the high school walls.

Up and down Venezuela, a quarter of a million kids are doing exactly what I am seeing here - spending six afternoons a week, from 2pm to 6pm, intensively studying classical music. This is a radical social project in which children, often living in unthinkable circumstances, are given the chance to punch through the poverty cycle - with the help of skills learned through music.

The System, as it is known (the hefty official title of the organisation that runs the project is Fundacion del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela) was born more than 30 years ago. But because of its perceived success, President Hugo Chavez has deemed it in tune with the socialist-revolutionary times. These days, the System has government funding of $29m (pounds 15m) a year - and it is seen as a flagship of national achievement, with children from youth orchestras frequently accompanying the comandante on his excursions as head of state. And the System is attracting international imitators - closest to home, the Scottish Arts Council is about to establish a pilot scheme on the Venezuelan model in one of the nation's most deprived housing schemes.

According to Richard Holloway, chair of SAC and a former bishop of Edinburgh: "You can't help being knocked out by the sexy, almost spiritual intensity of the playing of these kids; it is so deeply human. We decided we wanted to see whether a similar sort of project could make a difference in Scotland, in the sort of settled, workless areas that seem stubbornly resistant to attempts to break the cycle of poverty. It will either take off, or be an interesting experiment that doesn't work."

However, the System is also turning heads abroad because it is producing - and exporting - musicians of extraordinary quality. One of these is Edicson Ruiz, who, at 17, became the youngest ever bass player in the Berlin Philharmonic. At nine, he had been stacking supermarket shelves to contribute to the family's meagre income. Then, most strikingly, there is 25-year-old Gustavo Dudamel, who this year became chief conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (spurning Birmingham, according to rumour, whose orchestra is seeking a replacement for Sakari Oramo). He has just brought out a CD of Beethoven symphonies with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, the System's flagship ensemble.

Simon Rattle calls Dudamel "the most astonishingly gifted conductor I've ever come across". And he hails the system that produced him. "There is nothing more important in the world of music than what is happening in Venezuela," he says. "If anyone asks me where is something really important going on for the future of classical music, I say here." The combination of big talent and radical social action - tearing apart tired prejudices about classical music's elitism - is extraordinarily heady. Is Venezuela the unlikely country that could be the saviour of classical music?

It does not seem such a ludicrous notion when I watch the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra perform in Rome (British audiences will have to wait for this treat until next summer's Edinburgh festival). Dudamel shares the podium with Claudio Abbado - Rattle's predecessor at the Berlin Philharmonic is a mentor to Dudamel, and such a fan of the System that he spent three months last winter working with children in Venezuela. There are more than 100 children on stage, and, playing Beethoven's Fifth, they sound less like an orchestra than like a solid wall of thunderous, elemental sound. But more than that, the vitality of this music-making, the rapt faces of these young musicians, render words such as "urgent" and "passionate" utterly inadequate. In fact, everything they do makes European and North American ways of dealing with classical music seem grey and dull. These young people, aged up to 25, are playing as if their lives depended upon it - and in some ways, perhaps they do.

At the end of the concert, the lights dip into darkness. After a few seconds the orchestra is revealed again, now dressed in the gold, blue and red of Venezuela's national colours. They throw themselves into a showstopper, Danzon by the Mexican composer Arturo Marquez. Violins and violas sway and arc in unison, like shoals of fish. Whole sections leap up and start, literally, to dance to the infectious, sexy salsa rhythms. The audience go crazy. I've never seen anything like it.