The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a youth orchestra based in Seville, Spain, consisting of musicians from countries in the Middle East, of Egyptian, Iranian, Israeli, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and Spanish background. The Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said founded the orchestra in 1999, and named the ensemble after an anthology of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The first orchestra workshop was in Weimar, Germany, in 1999,[1] after the organisation had received over 200 applications from Arab music students.[2] Maestro Barenboim has also expressed interest in musicians from Iran (a non-Arab country but in conflict[clarification needed] with Israel) and allocating three chairs for Iranian musicians to play in the orchestra each year.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 12:37:24 +0000
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