The Orchestra of the Barenboim-Said Akademie was founded in 2023 by Daniel Barenboim, who led its public debut in April of that year with Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante and Schubert’s Symphony No. 3 at the Pierre Boulez Saal. The ensemble has since been heard there regularly performing works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Schoenberg, and Prokofiev, among others. The orchestra carries forward the vision of Maestro Barenboim and Edward W. Said, who believed that music and thought belong together and that both flourish through artistic excellence, critical listening, humanism, and intellectual curiosity. In 2024, conductor and double bassist Nabil Shehata was named the ensemble’s artistic director. A former member of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, he has been closely associated with the Akademie as a professor for double bass since 2019. In May 2026, the orchestra performed its first concert outside the Akademie at the International Chamber Music Festival in Verden. This November, it will be heard at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus as part of the Mendelssohn Festival.