Page 475 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

happens there, and he is slowly getting to grips with it. But his previous experience of outreach has
meant that he has been able to understand what worked and what was meaningful, so he can focus
on what he wants to do. And he is now based in the North East so that he is part of the community,
which is something that both he and RNS felt worked though it is tricky at the moment as he moved
in the middle of a pandemic!

Dinis Sousa and Orquestra XXI

Dinis comes from a country that does not have a huge orchestral scene and he started his own
orchestra in 2013. Orquestra XXI was initially just an idea that they created from scratch with friends
and he is proud of what has been achieved. His experience of doing such activities in Portugal is the
difficulty of getting long-term funding and the need to fight for money every time. This has given him
both a huge insight into the challenges ensembles face and also made him resilient, he can be
determined and tough.

Orquestra XXI arose out of the idea to create an ensemble out of all the young Portuguese musicians
who had left Portugal. Dinis comments that a lot of young musicians have left in the last 20 years
and this is part of a wider problem of young people leaving the country. The general idea of
Orquestra XXI was to bring people back to share what they were learning and doing abroad with
audiences at home in Portugal. Initially, Dinis did not know that many of the players, the orchestra
was created by building a network of Portuguese players in Europe. And the first year was kind of
explosive, the feeling of coming home and playing for family and friends.

Dinis has always loved music but when he was young, it never crossed his mind to be a conductor.
His parents enjoy and listen to a lot of classical music, and when the family inherited his Grandad's
piano, the young Dinis started trying to play it. So his mother enrolled him in a music school. But