West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (ES)

About

Founded in 1999 by conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian American academic Edward Said, the West Eastern Divan Orchestra is rooted in a deceptively simple idea: put young musicians from Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran and the Hispanic world in a room together, make music, and see what happens. Said and Barenboim named it after Goethe's anthology of poems, a work central to the idea of world culture, and the name still fits. Barenboim has always been clear that this is not a peace project but a project against ignorance, a platform where two sides can disagree without reaching for weapons. Based in Seville, the orchestra spends its summers rehearsing in Andalusia before heading out on tour, and over the years it has played everywhere from the BBC Proms to the Vatican to the Prague Spring Festival. At the Proms in 2012 it performed all nine Beethoven symphonies under Barenboim in a single season, something no conductor had managed there since Henry Wood in 1942. In 2016, the United Nations designated it a Global Advocate for Cultural Understanding.