A million fans may have watched their legendary 2007 Prom at the Royal Albert Hall on YouTube, but nothing compares to the experience of actually being in the concert hall when the players of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela are delivering their coup de grace.

On come the Venezuela-branded sports jackets and out pours the teenage adrenaline. Trumpets are hurled about like cheerleaders’ batons. Double basses are whipped around like spinning tops. And what happens when they’re done blasting out Bernstein’s Mambo (from West Side Story) with the fervour that only a Latin band can muster? To general and mounting hysteria, those jackets were ripped off and hurled into the crowd. Were we at the Southbank Centre or San Siro stadium? Sometimes it was hard to tell.

But the real surprise — the one that you can’t guess from that YouTube clip — is that there’s no disconnect between this orchestra’s encores and anything else they play. It all springs from the same source: a deeply personal connection to the music, bound together by the hyper-charged baton of Gustavo Dudamel. I’m sure I’ll hear plenty more performances of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony in the future, but I’m not sure I’ll forget Gonzalo Hidalgo’s soulful bassoon, eking out the final, poignant bars of the second movement. Likewise, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, a showpiece that’s often seized upon by a virtuoso orchestra, but rarely inflected with such explosive propulsion.

Some of this might be called exaggerated; everything about this band does, after all, scream extreme — not least the fact that they number some 180 players. But if Dudamel’s interpretative choices are correspondingly wild, nothing he does with his orchestra feels self-indulgent or over-milked. “We play it for the first time, but also as though it were the last,” the maestro once commented in rehearsal, and what we heard was precisely that sense of valedictory celebration.

So, what happens now? Perhaps the greatest compliment we can pay the orchestra would be to find out that one day they weren’t so extraordinary, and that our pretty terrific youth orchestras were getting the same adulation, for the same commitment. To do that will take a small amount of time and an awful lot of money. But looking at the children scrambling for a piece of Dudamel’s tracksuit top, the foot soldiers are ready and waiting.

The Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra residency continues until Saturday. Box office: 0871 663 2500. Last night’s concert will be broadcast on Classic FM on April 25

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