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"I would like a new beginning, to come in and see how things are here. Change for change's sake, I don't think that is good."

Laudrup would not be drawn over midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson, who performed well on loan at Swansea from German club Hoffenheim last season.

Swansea hope to sign the Iceland international midfielder on a permanent basis but Rodgers has admitted he would like to take him to Liverpool.

Laudrup said: "It's a special case. He was on loan here and did very well.

"He has a possibility to go to another club. He is owned by a German club. I would like him to stay, he did very well here."

Laudrup revealed he had spoken to chairman Huw Jenkins at length about the possibility of making new signings.

"To sign seven or eight players does not make sense," he added.

Jenkins said Laudrup's pedigree had been a big factor in the club bringing him in as the new manager.

He said: We're delighted to have somebody with Michael's background. It's great for us as a club that Michael has joined us.

"The most important thing is finding the right person with the personality to forge the right sort of relationship.

"We are really looking forward to taking the club forward and carrying on the good work we have done in the last two years."

To see it in action, I went to one of the dozens of nucleos or musical centres spread around the city (there are 270 in the country as a whole). Caracas is not a place a foreigner wanders around unchaperoned, so El Sistema laid on a car and minder to take me there.

As we speed down one of the highways that criss-cross the city, my minder turns on the radio. A charmingly old-fashioned folky jangle emerges, sounding like a Latino waltz.

“That is joropo,” he tells me. “It’s an old type of folk music from the southern plains of Venezuela, with harp and a small guitar called a cuatro. It comes from the last century, but people still like it. You see that?” he said, pointing towards one of the hills just ahead. At a distance it seems to be encrusted with red and blue boxes at crazy angles. As we get closer, the corrugated metal roofs become visible.

“That is a barrio, or slum. We have a lot of these in Caracas, and the nucleos are near them, so the children who come to us do not have to travel far.

“This one is called Antinamo, and is quite famous because the city authorities wanted to demolish it, but the people refused to leave.”

We’d now arrived at the purpose-built concrete block that is the Montalban nucleo. Inside there’s a hum of activity. Little children with scrubbed smiling faces and instrument cases come and go. Three rehearsals are going on at once, and their music mingles in the corridors. From behind one door I hear something reminiscent of the folk music I’d just heard. This turns out to be an orchestra of cuatros, rehearsing a folk song. In another room there’s a group of young string players who start with a song called Moliendo Café (Ground Coffee) and then move on to Handel’s Water Music. It’s fascinating to see a form of folk music and high Western art music taught side-by-side. Around the room are adult helpers, who apparently are there to keep order.

But all eyes were on the conductor, who never has to raise his voice. One of the minders tells me that the kids have been attending the nucleo since they were three, and so it is now an ingrained part of their lives.

Today they’re going to try something new. Marshall Marcus, violinist, one-time chief executive of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and head of music at London’s Southbank Centre, has returned to Caracas, where he used to play profesionally, to start a new project. He’s setting up a Baroque orchestra, the Espíritu Baroco Venezuelano, with players from the Sistema’s top youth orchestra, the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra. But from time to time he likes to engage with the little ones, and he’s come to show them what a Baroque violin bow looks like.

They all want to have a go, of course, but they didn’t seem so keen at his suggestion that they learn a two-part version of Corelli’s La Follia by ear. But with some help from the musical minders they get the hang of it with amazing speed.

Back in the car, heading towards El Sistema’s HQ in the city centre, Marcus tells me why he’s so set on bringing “early music” to Venezuela.

“I’m working with a group of 20 musicians from the main youth orchestra, the Teresa Carreño orchestra,” he says.

Does this involve new instruments? “Well, we have ordered 54 Baroque bows, and I’m encouraging my players to use the right sort of strings. But really this isn’t about creating a little clique of specialists,” he says. “It’s to do with encouraging a different sort of musicality, more to do with dancing than expressivity. Eventually I’d like all the players to experience it. They love the music already, it’s just a question of getting them to appreciate the style.”

After a lengthy drive we come to the nerve centre of El Sistema, an impressive combination of performance spaces and music school right by the botanical gardens in the centre of town. It’s a fascinating mix of Latin-American vibrancy and Southbank concrete brutalism, which opened only last year. The floor is made from a rare tropical hardwood, and the seats in the two concert halls are vibrantly coloured to a design by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. (He’s a favourite of Hugo Chávez, who takes a great interest in Sistema, and insists that its board reports direct to the presidential office.)

I’m shown around by Rodrigo Guerrero, head of international affairs, who rattles off reams of impressive statistics about the centre: two concert halls, 94 practice rooms, 1,500 daily visitors, all built at a cost of $50million.

The centre takes the best young players from the regional nucleos and offers them training and accommodation. And it hosts El Sistema’s five flagship orchestras, including the Simón Bolívar Orchestra, now a fully fledged adult orchestra, which will be appearing in Raploch and London as part of London 2012.

Wandering down the corridors, and peering at the pianists and brass ensembles rehearsing in the practice rooms, you might think you were in a normal conservatoire. But as El Sistema’s executive director Eduardo Mendez points out, this centre is actually called the Centre for Social Action Through Music.

“We are a social agency first and foremost,” he says, “and it’s our job to provide services to lots of government agencies such as the Ministry of Prisons, various medical agencies, the Education Ministry. You know we have a problem here in Venezuela, with violence becoming more prevalent generally, and we do a lot of work with offenders. I don’t say we have all the answers to their problems, but we do give them self-esteem and a means to reconnect with their families, who would otherwise reject them.”

On a three-day visit I wasn’t going to crack all of El Sistema’s secrets. But I did spot several key factors that will be hard to replicate in chilly Britain. Caribbean joyousness is one. The old-fashioned charismatic authority of a founder-figure is another. Yet another is the existence of a truly unified, national folk culture which has survived intact down the centuries. But perhaps the most important factor was revealed in a conversation I had with Juan, a cellist in Marcus’s Baroque orchestra.

“Before I joined the Sistema,” he says, “I was not serious about music, I was crazy about sport, and about partying. Then I joined Sistema in 2007, and there’s something about it that makes you grow up inside. When I visit my old friends I don’t feel comfortable any more. When I am with my new friends, and we talk about music and cello, I feel at home.”

For those who are in it, the Sistema isn’t a bolt-on to their lives – it becomes the centre of everything.

The Big Concert given by the Simón Bolívar Orchestra and children of the Raploch Big Noise takes place on June 21 at Old School Field, Drip Road, Raploch, Stirling (01786 274000). The Simón Bolívar Orchestra and Gustavo Dudamel are in residence at the Southbank Centre, London SE1, from June 23-26 for a programme of workshops, open rehearsals and concerts, as part of Shell Classic International’s Southbank season and London 2012 (0844 875 0073)