I can’t tell you which will be the best Proms this summer. But I can predict which will be the most emotional. Next weekend Daniel Barenboim brings his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to the Albert Hall for three concerts, including Beethoven’s opera Fidelio. Those who have heard previous Proms by this extraordinary ensemble, in which young Israelis and Arabs sit side by side, won’t need any encouragement to return. Elgar once spoke of his First Symphony as embodying a “massive hope for the future”. I daresay that Barenboim and his Palestinian friend, the late Edward Said, had the same thought when, ten years ago, they set up the “Divan” (the orchestra’s name alludes to the title Goethe gave a poetry collection inspired by the Persian writer Hafiz). “The destinies of Palestinians and Israelis are inextricably linked,” Barenboim once told me. “We are blessed, or cursed, to live with each other. I prefer the first.”

His orchestra is the most obvious sign of that belief. “The principle was quite simple,” Barenboim notes in his fascinating book, Everything is Connected. “Once the young musicians agreed on how to play just one note together they would not be able to look at each other in the same way again.”

That idealistic notion is confirmed by Elena Cheah’s An Orchestra Beyond Borders (published this month by Verso), in which dozens of Divan members talk — courageously, frankly and often movingly — about their often harrowing family circumstances. “We Middle Easterners are all great artists when it comes to abusing historical knowledge in order to demonstrate our victimhood and wallow in self-pity,” Barenboim writes wryly in the book’s introduction. But none of these young musicians struck me as self-pitying or blinkered. Rather, they seem to have learnt from their maestro (who astonished even his friends last year by taking Palestinian citizenship in tandem with his Israeli passport) about the importance of listening and responding to contrary opinions.

Barenboim believes that music should be “not an alternative to living, but a model for living”. By that he means not simply that people making music have to learn to co-operate, allow different voices to lead in turn, and relish the rich harmonies that are possible when everyone agrees to move together. He also believes that politicians can learn from music about how complex arguments — over a disputed land, for example — can be suitably resolved only if peace processes are launched at the right moment and in the right tempo.

Some cynics dismiss him as a naive dreamer or, worse, a showman addicted to headline-grabbing statements. I don’t deny that there are elements of both in his personality. In a piano-playing and conducting career that now stretches for an astonishing 60 years, he has always made news — one way or another. But I find his political “meddling” (as his critics would describe it) admirable and refreshing. I wish more world-famous musicians, actors, directors, artists and writers would use their status to try to change the world for the better.

Yes, I know that every few years Bob Geldof summons the multimillionaires of the “rockocracy” to rant about how little the West is doing for Africa (and, of course, to get themselves invaluable prime-time TV exposure). And yes, one can think of isolated instances where cultural luminaries took a stand against something they considered wrong. I recall Rostropovich rushing to Moscow in 1991, for instance, to join Boris Yeltsin in the besieged White House because he sensed that Russia’s new democracy was about to be smothered at birth.

But great performers tend to steer clear of direct political involvement — fearing, perhaps, a media backlash like the one that greeted Valery Gergiev last year when he conducted what was perceived as a “victory concert” for Russian soldiers in South Ossetia. I can’t think of any world-famous musician who has so consistently campaigned against injustice as Barenboim has done.

Which is why I wouldn’t miss his orchestra’s Proms for the world — especially playing Fidelio, an opera that’s all about tyranny overthrown not by violence but by love, courage and decency. “Usually when we come to the Proms,” Barenboim declared after his Albert Hall concert last year, “I am encouraged to say a few words about what’s wrong with the Middle East. But you’ve just heard what’s right with the Middle East.” That wasn’t a boast. It was the comment of a man suffused with joy that, however briefly, the children of all those perennially warring tribes had sat down together and produced a little soundbite of heaven.

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