Venezuela attempts to break record for world largest orchestra

By Dilara Hamit

ANKARA (AA) - Venezuela broke a Guinness world record Saturday for the largest orchestra in the world with a concert where 12,000 children and young people performed Slavic March by Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

Venezuela’s military academy came together with hundreds of violins, violas, double basses sounded, woodwinds, brass and percussion gradually joined, where thousands of musicians, mostly children and adolescents, were playing with a single goal: to set the record as the world’s largest orchestra.

The musicians, all connected to the country’s network of youth orchestras, performed the roughly 10-minute piece outdoors under the watchful eyes of independent supervisors whose job was to verify that more than 8,097 instruments were playing simultaneously, which would break the current record.

The performance was shown live on YouTube at the Patio de Honor of the Military Academy in the Fort Tiuna complex in Caracas.

Guinness World Records will determine within 10 days whether a record was set. More than 250 supervisors were assigned a group of musicians to observe the performance.