Daniel Barenboim rehearsing with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra - 16/4/2009
Daniel Barenboim is a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights
In a rare performance by a prominent Israeli musician in Egypt, Daniel Barenboim has received a rapturous reception at the Cairo Opera House.
Mr Barenboim conducted the Cairo Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
The famed conductor and pianist has long strived to use music to bring people together in the region.
He is a supporter of Palestinian statehood and a critic of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians.
'Human project'
His visit - the result of an invitation from the Austrian embassy in Cairo - is believed to be the first by a prominent Israeli musician in Egypt, one of the few Arab states to have signed a peace deal with Israel.
As well as conducting the orchestra, Mr Barenboim played Beethoven's Pathetique piano sonata.
"Every military victory of Israel has left it politically weaker"
Daniel Barenboim
Answering criticism that the time was not right for such a visit, following Israel's offensive in Gaza earlier this year, Mr Barenboim said bringing musicians from both sides together was not a political project, but a human one.
"For 60 years they have been trying with force and they haven't solved anything," he said during rehearsals for the concert. "Every military victory of Israel has left it politically weaker."
"I hope very much that this, my first visit to Egypt, will maybe allow another way of thinking to come," he added.
The concert was largely welcomed in Egypt, but has been criticised by some who feel Egypt should resist closer ties with Israel until a final peace deal is reached with the Palestinians.
The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, refused an invitation to attend from the Egyptian culture minister.
'Mutual ignorance'
Mr Barenboim founded the joint Arab-Israeli orchestra, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, with the late Palestinian-American writer Edward Said in 1999 to further cultural exchange between young people in Israel and the Arab world.
His views earned him an honorary Palestinian Authority passport in 2007.
The conductor, a former child prodigy pianist who moved to Israel from his native Argentina at the age of nine, said on Wednesday that he had always been curious about life in Arab countries.
He said too few Israelis were curious about their neighbours, and that the ignorance went both ways.
"To put all Israelis in one basket and say we boycott, we don't want anything to do with them, anyone who goes there is an enemy, this is no good," he said in Cairo.
"It would be much better that Egyptians, and Syrians, and Palestinians, and Jordanians, and Lebanese, will go to Tel Aviv, and explain their point of view."
Despite leading the Divan Orchestra around the globe, the Cairo performance is only Mr Barenboim's third in the Arab world, after performances in Morocco in 2003 and the West Bank city of Ramallah in 2005.
Two concerts in Qatar and Egypt were called off in January because of safety concerns for the Divan Orchestra musicians during the Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip.
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