Thousands of Venezuelan musicians, most of them children and adolescents, have earned the title of the world's largest orchestra.

Axar.az reports citing foreign media that the previous record was set by 8,573 musicians.

Guinness World Records in a video released Saturday announced that the musicians, all connected to the country's network of youth orchestras, earned the designation with a performance a week earlier of Tchaikovsky's “Slavonic March".

The network of orchestras known as El Sistema, or The System, assembled some 12,000 musicians for the concert. The repertoire included “Venezuela” by Pablo Herrero and Jose Luis Armenteros, the South American country's national anthem and Pedro Gutierrez's “Alma Llanera”, which Venezuelans consider their unofficial anthem.

More than 250 supervisors were each assigned a group of musicians to observe during the record attempt.

The previous record belonged to a Russian group that played that country's national anthem.