El Sistema: Music to Change Life Blu-ray

El Sistema: Music to Change Life

Documentary | Music



Three decades ago, visionary Venezuelan musician and politician José Antonio Abreu founded El Sistema, a national system of music education designed as a model for social improvement. Today, some 265,000 Venezuelan children and young people are involved in choirs and orchestras around the country, and El Sistema is exporting some of the world’s finest musicians. A film by Paul Smaczny and Maria Stodtmeier, 'El Sistema: Music to Change Life' takes us from the barrios of Caracas and Maracay to the concert hall of the Lucerne Festival, following the lives of children who have found the way to a better future through the model of the symphony orchestra.

For more details about El Sistema: Music to Change Life on Blu-ray, see the El Sistema: Music to Change Life Blu-ray Review

El Sistema: Music to Change Life Blu-ray, Video Quality

 


El Sistema arrives from EuroArts with a very sharp 1080p AVC encoded transfer that offers brilliant color and excellent detail. This is an unusually broad based documentary with, for example, the gleaming skyscrapers of Caracas (as well as its heartbreaking barrios) on a broad scale offering some at times jaw dropping depth of field. On the other hand, the documentary gets literally up close and personal with several children, and fine detail is so crystal clear the viewer can virtually count the individual pores on any given child's face. Caracas is an unusually colorful city, and this Blu-ray offers a gorgeously saturated palette of multi-colored stucco buildings and some intricately woven fabrics which various people wear. Skin tones are lifelike and the entire color spectrum is extremely well represented throughout the documentary. El Sistema is a very fine looking documentary indeed, with no artifacting of any import to report.

El Sistema: Music to Change Life Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 


Luckily the two audio options provide the same excellence as the image quality. The DTS HD-MA 5.1 is excellently directional, though perhaps strangely that's most evident in some of the smaller scale musical moments, as when two tyro brass players clearly emanate from the left channel. The full orchestral moments, though unfortunately as brief as they are, provide a robust soundfield that is absolutely accurate and offers brilliant range in both frequency and dynamics. All of this said, El Sistema is really not a music concert documentary by any stretch of the imagination. Long sequences are nothing other than people talking, and the 5.1 mix offers that dialogue crisply and cleanly front and center, with easy to read subtitles. Perhaps by virtue of the very fact that this isn't a music performance documentary per se, the uncompressed PCM 2.0 folddown actually does a completely excellent job and few will find anything to complain about with its narrower sound field.

El Sistema: Music to Change Life Blu-ray, News and Updates

• Youth Orchestra Performs in Toronto Ahead of El Sistema Release - October 19, 2009