Israeli pianist Barenboim plays West Bank

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Israeli musician Daniel Barenboim received a rapturous reception when he brought a program of Beethoven and Brahms -- and a message of Israel-Palestinian reconciliation -- to this West Bank town Saturday.\nThe renowned pianist and conductor, a longtime critic of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, played a packed and sweltering auditorium at a Ramallah school, the scene of a visit last year that angered some Israelis.\n"I realize this isn't a normal concert for you. It isn't a normal concert for me either," Barenboim told the audience.\nBarenboim, 60, an Argentine, born a Jew and raised in Israel, received three standing ovations from an audience of about 350 Palestinians and a smattering of international diplomats.\nHe played a program of Beethoven sonatas, including a duet of the "Moonlight Sonata" with 26-year-old Palestinian pianist Salim Abboud, and performed some Brahms with his son Michael, 17.\nPalestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi, who was in the audience, said the concert was "a gift to the Palestinian people."\n"He's making a statement in the most expressive way he can," Ashrawi said. "He's reaching out to the Palestinian people with the utmost solidarity in a very creative and human way. He touches the soul."\nBarenboim has long campaigned for Arab-Israeli reconciliation and has annoyed some Israelis with his forthright criticism of government policy toward the Palestinians.\nAt a press conference before the concert, Barenboim said Israel's future depended on the creation of a viable Palestinian state.\n"I firmly believe that for the continuation for the development of the Jewish people and the state of Israel, it is imperative that a just solution is found for Palestinian independence," Barenboim told reporters.\n"The future of Israel, in whatever form or shape it develops, it is totally dependent on that," he added.\nIn March 2002 Barenboim canceled a planned master class for Palestinian students in Ramallah after the Israeli army refused to grant him permission for a visit. He eventually traveled to Ramallah with a German diplomatic escort and played the concert last September.\n"I am sure that there are people in the Israeli government that are not happy about my being here," he said Saturday. "But then, I am not happy about many things that they do, so it's all right."\nBarenboim also angered many of his countrymen in 2001 when he included music by Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler's favorite composer, in a program for Israel's premier cultural event, the Israel Festival.\nSince the early 1990s, he and Palestinian academic Edward Said have run a summer workshop for young musicians from Israel and Arab countries in places like Germany, the United States and Spain.\nBarenboim said the workshop's goal "is simply to fight ignorance and allow contact so that they learn to know the other. Whether they like the other or not is their own private business.\n"The time has come now not to build walls but to build bridges," he added.\nDuring Saturday's visit, which came at the invitation of the National Conservatory of Music at Birzeit University, Barenboim announced plans for a Palestinian youth orchestra and a new music program for two Palestinian schools.