In North Korea, Breaking a Barrier With Sound
N.Y. Philharmonic's Landmark Concert Opens 'a Little Door'

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

PYONGYANG, North Korea, Feb. 27 -- Symphonic diplomacy won bravos and standing ovations here Tuesday night, as the New York Philharmonic performed a concert without precedent in this shuttered Stalinist state that has long considered the United States to be its prime enemy.

Swinging from a rollicking rendition of George Gershwin's "An American in Paris" to a moving interpretation of Korea's beloved folk anthem "Arirang," the concert delighted a mostly male, standing-room-only audience of North Koreans. Nearly all of them were wearing lapel pins bearing the face of their leader, Kim Jong Il, or of his late father, Kim Il Sung, who created this heavily armed communist nation.

Broadcast live here on state television and radio, the concert opened with the national anthems of both countries, as the audience of Communist Party members and supporters stood for the playing of their own "Patriotic Song" and "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Although Kim did not attend the evening performance -- concert hall security was light throughout the day, a telltale sign -- it was quickly characterized as a musical and diplomatic triumph by Lorin Maazel, the Philharmonic's music director.

"Little could we know that we would be drawn into orbit by this stunning reaction," Maazel told reporters minutes after the concert, which was supported by the Bush administration but criticized by some because of human rights issues in the North. "I think it is going to do a great deal for Korean-U.S. relations. We may have been instrumental in opening a little door."

Asked if he was disappointed that Kim had not attended, Maazel responded: "I have yet to see the president of the United States at one of my concerts. Sometimes politicians are too busy."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, during a one-day visit to Beijing, said the concert was a good thing but cautioned against trying to portray it as a diplomatic breakthrough. "North Korea needs ways to open up," she said. "This is positive. But it's a long way from changing the situation of North Korea."

One prominent American who was in the audience here, William J. Perry, a defense secretary in the Clinton administration, shared Maazel's view that the concert could become a milestone for U.S.-North Korea relations, which bottomed out in October 2006 when the North detonated a small nuclear bomb.

"You cannot demonize people when you are listening to their music," said Perry, who as a private citizen has worked to improve U.S. relations with Kim's government. "And you don't go to war unless you have demonized them first. The concert was sublime, historic and may have pushed us over the top."

The eruption of applause at the end of the concert, which continued until nearly the entire orchestra had left the curtainless stage, seemed spontaneous and genuine.

But events offstage throughout the day pointed to the undertow of strangeness, fakery and fear that infects life in this country, where authorities confine hundreds of thousands of citizens in labor camps and sometimes shoot those who try to flee over its borders.

Tuesday's concert was supposed to have ended with a "surprise" -- six North Korean musicians coming onstage to play an encore with the Philharmonic.

That, at least, is what Maazel, speaking to reporters just a few hours before the concert, had enthusiastically said would happen.

But the North Koreans did not appear. After the concert, Maazel was asked why. He said that he had simply changed his mind. The president of the orchestra, Zarin Mehta, said the North Korean government had had no influence on the decision.

Another curious no-show occurred before the concert. The North Korean vice minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, had announced that he would meet with Western reporters traveling with the orchestra.

A room near the concert hall was set up with cameras and microphones and it soon filled with Western journalists. Without explanation from the government, Song did not appear before reporters, who would have asked him to explain why the country's leader was skipping the concert.

On Tuesday morning, as the orchestra held a dress rehearsal, government officials known among the visitors as "minders" took reporters by bus on a tour of Pyongyang that appeared to involve fakery.

The primary event of the tour was a walk-about inside a vast concrete monolith called the Grand People's Study House.

Part library, part lecture center and part showcase for statues and paintings of Kim father and son, the building was shown off as a "grand palace" for higher learning that is "completely free" to North Koreans. (Reporters were asked to pay $4.)

In Reading Room No. 3, devoted to social science texts, tour guide Hye Yong explained how the late Kim Il Sung (known here as the "Great Leader") had personally designed the room's study desks. "The Great Leader gave on-the-spot guidance here for height and angle of desk," she said.

More than 10,000 people come daily to the Grand People's Study House to read books, attend lectures, listen to music and surf the North Korean "Intranet," a data source controlled by the state, Hye said.

Although the country does not allow ordinary citizens to use the Internet, Hye said access was coming "soon."

During the press tour of a dozen or so of the 600 rooms in the Grand People's Study House, it slowly became apparent that something odd was going on.

Several hundred people had spontaneously chosen to attend various classes and lectures on Tuesday, Hye explained. But almost none of these citizens budged from their seats during the hour or so that the foreign reporters were wandering around in the building.

Indeed, these citizens rarely looked up from the old books, old journals and old computers that they appeared to be studying or using, no matter how many noisy Western reporters barged into their rooms and began making a sharp-elbowed ruckus.

It was a striking -- and seemingly staged -- display of scholarly discipline.

Until the New York Philharmonic flew into Pyongyang on Monday, the orchestra's most highly publicized performance in a closed society had occurred in 1959, when conductor Leonard Bernstein led a concert tour of the Soviet Union.

What the Soviet leadership did not anticipate was that the tour would become a "two-edge sword" for regime change, Maazel told reporters Tuesday. He said the 1959 tour started a gradual process of cultural and information exchange that helped lead to the eventual collapse of the Soviet system.

Before the concert, Maazel was asked if that might happen here.

"There are no parallels in history, there are only similarities," he replied. "The Soviet Union was a vast country, monolithic and a superpower. And from the United States' point of view, it was a global threat.

"The Korean Peninsula is a very small area geographically," he said. It has an "entirely different role to play in the course of human events. To draw a parallel would be to do a disservice to the people who are living here."

After the concert, Maazel sounded more hopeful and less guarded. He said "normalization" of relations between the United States and North Korea was now a possibility, although it might take two decades.

"Groundwork has been laid," he said. "There is no question about it."