Meet the YouTube Symphony

Back in December, we were talking about Google’s open auditions for the YouTube Symphony.

Now you can meet some of the musicians and get tickets for the April 15 Carnegie Hall concert. The audition winners were unveiled earlier this month.

YouTube Symphony Orchestra conductor Michael Tilson Thomas told NPR:

“Speaking from my heart, I must say that it was really an interesting window into the lives of all of these music lovers worldwide… Some of them were clearly auditioning in their dorm rooms,” Thomas says. “Some people were obviously playing on pedigreed instruments and others on really banged-up practice instruments. One guy auditioned on an upright piano with no lid, in some back room of a theater. And the guy’s a tremendous artist, and he’s going to be in the YouTube Symphony.”

A commenter on the NPR thread mentions how innovative it is to audition online — but clearly, this person hasn’t yet perused ArkivMusic’s new LISTEN magazine, in which Metropolitan Opera CEO Peter Gelb “confesses” to a pretty systematic perusal of anything that aspiring opera singers put up on YouTube.