Cairo Symphony Orchestra

Franz Litschauer, an Austrian, took the first rehearsals of the new orchestra in 1959; the Yugoslav conductors Gika Zdravkovitch and Dushan Miladinovitch followed, and then Egyptian musicians — Ahmed Ebeid, Youssef Elsisi, and Ahmed El-Saedi, a composer as well as a conductor, whose own scores the players have taken up. Resident at the Cairo Opera House, the orchestra has drawn guests of the standing of Charles Munch, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Mstislav Rostropovich, and in April 2009 Daniel Barenboim both played the Pathétique sonata and conducted Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with it.