Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra return to the US for five performances from coast to coast. The Divan will perform R. Strauss’s “Don Quixote” – with the Iranian cellist Kian Soltani and the Israeli violist Miriam Manasherov – and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has been a significant presence in the international music world for almost 20 years. In 1999, Daniel Barenboim and the late Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said created a workshop for young musicians from Israel, Palestine and several Arab countries to promote coexistence and intercultural dialogue. They named the orchestra after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s collection of poems entitled “West-Eastern Divan” a central work for the development of the concept of world culture.