After years of strenuously avoiding any public statement about the ever more dire political situation in his homeland, the star conductor last week gave a strenuously evenhanded plea for both sides to settle their differences – whereupon both sides attacked him. Now, after a young musician was shot while protesting, Dudamel has directly called on “the President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen to the voice of the Venezuelan people. … Democracy cannot be built to fit the needs of a particular government or otherwise it would cease to be a democracy.”