When Jose Antonio Abreu founded El Sistema in February 1975, there were two professional symphony orchestras in Venezuela, both employing largely Eastern European musicians. Today, there are dozens of professional orchestras, all of them peopled by Venezuelan El Sistema graduates. Hundreds of nucleos around the country provide music education and social care to hundreds of thousands of youngsters, the majority of them from families living below the poverty line.

El Sistema 40 celebrates this phenomenon with a colourful CD of recordings by the most prominent of the El Sistema graduates including Gustavo Dudamel.