14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube, owned by the giant Google, has recently auditioned for and subsequently formed an orchestra that contains more than 90 musicians. The newly-created YouTube Symphony Orchestra includes both professional and amateur musicians and will have its official debut on April 15th at Carnegie Hall, in New York.
One of the winners is Calvin Lee, a 38-year-old surgeon, who had barely played his violin for the last 15 years. He impressed YouTube visitors with his video audition where he played “Presto” from the Violin Sonata in G minor, by Johann Sebastian Bach, even though he stopped playing the instrument when he started medical school. Even the strings of the violin were 15 years old and the fact that Lee's fingers did not have the common calluses caused by frequent playing helped him handle the instrument with more ease.
"You see me wincing on the video, it's actually from real pain," Lee declared. "It may be pain from playing the wrong note, but it's also physical pain." The man said that he used to play violin in college and that he decided to start up again to help him increase his dexterity as a surgeon. "Music is an art form and actually I believe that surgery is an art form as well," he believes.
Overall, YouTube has received more than 3,000 auditions and the final group composed of more than 90 musicians has been selected using online votes from the site's visitors, as well as the opinions of several music experts from renowned orchestras. The components of YouTube Symphony Orchestra are planned to travel to New York from almost 30 countries to attend a three-day meeting with Michael Tilson Thomas, the music director of San Francisco Symphony, leading up to the grand show on April 15th.
While the auditions were in full swing, the participants have been giving each other feedback using online comments or e-mail messages, and this communication will come in handy to the orchestra when it takes official shape next month. "It's interesting that in the real world this will be the first time they come together," stated Ed Sanders, one of YouTube's product marketing managers. “But they've actually had a lot of togetherness since the beginning of the project.”