Author - Michal Shein

The idea behind the YouTube Symphony Orchestra was to bring young musicians together from disparate countries and through an audition process by which videos were uploaded and votes cast via the Internet, 90+ musicians were chosen from 30 different countries. The concert was at Carnegie Hall, with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, and with lots of classical music celebrities thrown in for good measure — some via video and some live on stage. Its success can be debated, (see Polyphonic friend, Greg Sandow’s review at Arts Journal), but one thing is for sure. An undertaking of this magnitude had the performers’ hearts pumping. Michal Shein, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, gives Polyphonic.org readers an inside view of the whole process through her own, personal experience as a cellist in the orchestra.