Another great event from TED 2009: the TED Prize talk from Venezuelan teacher/conductor Jose Antonio Abreu — while his talk is good & interesting, the scope of his work — building El Sistema to educate hundreds of thousands of youths in Venezuela — is astounding. But the really amazing part of this presentation was seeing, via video, a live concert of the Venezuela Youth Orchestra conducted by one of Abreu’s students, Gustavo Dudamel, who’s now leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was an amazing performance, and then when you consider that the artists are all kids, many of them from very rough backgrounds, it’s even more meaningful. Below is just Abreu’s talk — hopefully the TED folks will get the performance video up, too.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
TED Prize: Jose Antonio Abreu
John's Blog 
The NYT article is great and gives a lot of background information WRT El Sistema. The concert in Venezuela’s very cool too!