The idea of unit­ing young mu­si­cians from Is­rael, Palestine, Syr­ia, Jordan, Le­ban­on, Egypt and oth­er Ar­ab coun­tries in­to an en­semble still seems in­cred­ible, al­most im­possible, today. Yet such an or­ches­tra has been in ex­ist­ence and flour­ish­ing since 1999, when Daniel Bar­en­boim and his friend Ed­ward Said de­cided to found the West-East­ern Di­van Or­ches­tra.

At the 2007 Salzburg Fest­iv­al, Daniel Bar­en­boim con­duc­ted this sold-out con­cert of the West-East­ern Di­van Or­ches­tra. The con­cert be­gins with Lud­wig van Beeth­oven's 3. "Le­onore Over­ture" – not co­in­cid­ent­ally the over­ture to Beeth­oven's free­dom op­era "Fi­delio," a scath­ing con­dem­na­tion of tyranny and polit­ic­al re­pres­sion.

This is fol­lowed by Arnold Schoen­berg's in­tric­ate and mul­tilayered "Vari­ations for Or­ches­tra" of 1928, the com­poser's first work for full or­ches­tra in the twelve-tone sys­tem. In the next piece, Tchaikovsky's Sym­phony No. 6, the "Pathétique", Bar­en­boim pulls out all the stops and coaxes rarely heard in­stru­ment­al lines and ac­cents from the depth of his en­semble – an in­ter­pret­a­tion whose emo­tion­al im­pact un­der­scores the world-class mu­si­cian­ship of the West-East­ern Di­van Or­ches­tra.