BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.
Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks,
book and luxury that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast,
but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My cast away this week is the conductor Gustavo Dudamel.
He's a music superstar whose popularity transcends traditional genre expectations.
As musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the past 17 years,
nobody has done more to bring classical music to new audiences or to inspire young musicians.
He was born in Venezuela in 1981 and at the age of five joined El Sistema,
the country's youth music programme.
He first picked up the baton at 12 and became director of the LA Philharmonic just 14 years later.
Under his leadership, the orchestra has,
as well as exploring the classical canon, embraced collaborations with the pop world,
playing the Super Bowl halftime show and Coachella Festival,
as well as introducing a US version of the programme he grew up in.
Youth Orchestra Los Angeles reaches almost 2,000 young musicians in LA and many more nationwide.