A German orchestra will play Beethoven and Brahms in Tehran in a rare visit by a European ensemble amid tension between Iran and the West.

The 60-member Osnabrueck Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Hermann Baeumer, will perform Wednesday and Thursday as part of an exchange that saw the Tehran Symphony Orchestra perform to a packed hall last year in Osnabrueck, located in northwestern Germany.

Iran and Western governments, including Germany, have been at odds with Iran over Tehran's nuclear program and U.S. accusations that Iran helps militants attack American forces in Iraq.

"It's a very small step in improving relations between the people in the two countries," said Michael Dreyer, head of Osnabrueck's Morgenland Festival, which hosted the Iranians last year.

The orchestra will perform Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3; Sir Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor and Brahms' Symphony No. 4.

As required in Iran, the female German musicians will wear headscarves — as the Iranian female musicians did when they visited Osnabrueck — and the program was submitted to Iranian authorities ahead of time.

A visit from a large-scale, highly professional Western classical ensemble will be a landmark event, Tehran Symphony Orchestra conductor Nader Mashayekhi said.

"For such a good orchestra, of such size, it's the first time," he said.

Under the monarchy toppled by Iran's Islamic Revolution, Western visitors included the Berlin Philharmonic and its renowned conductor, Herbert von Karajan, who played three concerts in November 1975 — one of them just for the shah and his guests, according to the orchestra's archives.

Today, Western music and culture occupy an uncertain position. After ousting the shah in 1979 and establishing an Islamic republic, clerics outlawed all pre-revolutionary music.

Some hardline clerics say music comes between the faithful and God, and leads to impure thoughts, therefore being incompatible with the Shia school of Islam that rules Iran. Secular songs were banned as un-Islamic, and in the early 1980s, police stopped cars to check tape decks and smashed offending tapes.

In the 1990s, music gradually made a comeback in Iran under the then-president, reformist Mohammad Khatami. Then in December 2005, the hardline government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced a ban on Western music on state radio and television.