[ad_1]
Israeli, Palestinian and other Middle Eastern musicians brought a message of peace this week to an America torn by caustic political discourse.
For nearly 20 years, the orchestra of conductor Daniel Barenboim and late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said has performed at the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
"We are looking for something almost impossible, but still we try," said Kian Soltani, 26, a rising Iranian cellist who gave a fiery performance Wednesday at Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
The orchestra opened its program with Richard Strauss's symphonic poem "Don Quixote", inspired by the early 17th century novel about the romantic knight-errant who fights imaginary tyrants.
In many ways, the piece is a metaphor for the orchestra itself.
"If somebody would tell us that peace in the Middle East was impossible, we would still like it because we could," Soltani, who played the title role, told AFP.
"It's the same for Don Quixote, he thinks he's a knight, he thinks his dream is possible."
Quixotic as it may be, the project is making its first coast-to-coast American tour just as the United States reels from a series of deadly hate crimes.
Politics and war have been set to work in all countries. There was a concert in the West Bank city of Ramallah, in 2005, and none in Israel.
"It's a pity," violist Miriam Manasherov, 37, told AFP.
"The day that we will be able to play in Israel or in the other countries that we can not go to, that will be a huge success."
She plays the rotund Sancho Panza, who supports her master gone mad as well as she loves her world, justice and peace in an ugly world.
Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, which evolves from dark to light in a recurring "Fate" theme.
In "Don Quixote", the hero finally gives up on his dream, returns home and dies among his loved ones. The orchestra is hoping to march towards a different future.
Read also: Forbidden City hosts record label's 120th anniversary concert
– Changing attitudes –
While he acknowledges that the orchestra – which borrows his name from Goethe's German lyric poems – Persian poet Hafez – has not had much impact on the ground in the Middle East, Barenboim says the project has left a "terrific" stamp musically.
"It's about 1,000 people," said Argentina-born Barenboim, who also claims Israeli, Palestinian and Spanish citizenship.
"Nobody who comes into this with whatever preconceptions he has, goes away thinking the same way."
The orchestra's first coast-to-coast US tour is a homecoming of spells for Barenboim, 75, who stepped down to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's director in 2006 as a conductor and pianist there.
The Midwestern city was on the first stop, on Monday, ahead of performances in Washington DC, New York 's Carnegie Hall, Berkeley, California and Los Angeles.
During their last US visit, in 2013, the orchestra performed the Beethoven symphony cycle at Carnegie Hall, Boston, Providence, Rhode Island.
"Barenboim said about the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"You can not solve this militarily, unless you kill everybody, and you can not solve it politically.
"You can only get to know that their destinies are inextricably linked and therefore accept the existence of the other."
Deceptively simple as it may seem, that is the thrust behind the orchestra and the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, which trains gifted musicians mainly from the Middle East and North Africa for a professional career.
Richard Wagner's "The Mastersingers of Nürnberg", a work in progress, has been widely adopted by the orchestra's unique make-up.
[ad_2]
Source link
