Saving Gaza's only grand piano

The only concert grand piano in war-ravaged Gaza has been rediscovered and brought back to life after years of neglect. It survived last year's war with Israel - though only just - but was unplayable until a restorer arrived on a special mission from France, and paved the way for a rare concert.

When my eyes got used to the gloom of the Nawras Theatre in northern Gaza, I gasped at the scale of the destruction.

A tangle of cables, twisted metal and broken lamps hung down like spilled entrails from the shattered ceiling. The luxurious scarlet seats were littered with crumbled plasterboard. 

The theatre - one of very few in Gaza - had been expensively refurbished just months before a rocket landed a few metres away during last summer's war with Israel.

But then, in the middle of the wreckage, I got my first glimpse of a greater treasure that, almost miraculously, had survived unscathed. On the cracked marble of the stage, dusty but intact, stood a concert grand piano - the only one in Gaza. 

That's what Claire Bertrand, a young French music technician, and I had travelled to find. But Claire isn't one to stand and gawp. She marched up to the piano, flung up the lid and gazed in horror at the rusty strings inside. She tapped - or, rather, crunched - a few keys and listened to the grating notes.

"This is not a piano!" she muttered. "Everything is dead."

There's disagreement about how exactly the instrument got there. It's a Yamaha, and it's believed to have come from Japan. But was it, as some say, an official gift from the Japanese government to the Palestinian Authority? Or was it, as others imagine, an instrument brought by a Japanese diplomat for his daughter to play, and left behind? 

All that's certain is that it ended up in the late 1990s in the Nawras Theatre. Once, before the piano came, the theatre hosted shows featuring music, comedy, even satire - but with the gradual worsening of the conflict around Gaza, and a steady growth of conservatism in local society, such performances became a thing of the past. After the Islamist militant movement, Hamas, took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, live music events became even rarer. The piano was stored out of sight, largely forgotten and uncared-for, until, two years ago, it was rediscovered by Khamis Abu Shaaban, the administrator of Gaza's music school, and Lukas Pairon, the founder of the Brussels-based charity, Music Fund, which sends instruments to Gaza and other places around the world where they are needed, and trains local people to repair them.

They were drawing up an inventory of all Gaza's pianos. Abu Shaaban heard a rumour there was one at the Nawras, but assumed it was an upright. They were astonished to find a grand. And even more astonished - when war broke out several months later - that the piano survived intact, despite the wreckage that fell all around it.