Krakow – the setting for this year's concert by the World Orchestra for Peace, the international ensemble that Georg Solti set up in 1995, and which Valery Gergiev has conducted since Solti's death in 1997. The orchestra has given just 13 concerts in its entire history, and today they start rehearsing for the 14th, marking 70 years since the start of the second world war and 20 since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 95 players, handpicked by Gergiev, come from 35 countries. I'm here to find out how he makes a great orchestra out of them in just two days – with Mahler's Fifth and a world premiere of a piece by Krzysztof Penderecki on the programme – and what the orchestra can hope to achieve for the cause of world peace.
The London Symphony Orchestra is well represented in the ranks of the World Orchestra for Peace, as you'd expect with Gergiev as the LSO's chief conductor. Viola player Edward Vanderspar is joint principal of his section in the LSO, and has played in nearly every World Orchestra for Peace concert. He performed the Kol Nidrei yesterday beside a fragment of the restored wall of Krakow's Jewish ghetto, a place that saw 15,000 people incarcerated between 1941 and 1943; most were eventually murdered or sent to concentration camps.
Krakow's civic memorials to this horror are a strange combination of the mawkish and the desolate: rickshaws cart tourists around on an itinerary that includes Oskar Schindler's factory, the ghetto and Kazimierz. In the square in which Jews were rounded up and executed, there is a collection of cast-iron chairs bolted into the ground that Krakowians use more as a meeting place than a place of commemoration. Ed's performance was the most moving tribute you could imagine: his playing of the simple, sad melody was a fragment of experience that connected us across the generations to the thousands whose voices were silenced. If playing music for peace means anything at all, this was it.
