Word: concert
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with a new acoustic shell around the stage to make the hall worthy of the New York Philharmonic. Some 1,400 people were present - mostly North Koreans, and a few dozen foreign diplomats and businesspeople. Who the North Koreans were, exactly, was maddeningly vague. Maazel had said before the concert that he hoped "ordinary" Koreans would be among those attending, but no one from the orchestra had a clue who the tickets had been given to. Our handlers never gave me anything approaching a straight answer to that question. Random members of the audience interviewed by journalists included middle-level...
...thanks to the historic concert by the New York Phil, coming amid a slow-motion diplomatic thaw already underway between Pyongyang and Washington, I would finally get to see a little of the place for myself. The North Koreans, to say the least, are control freaks, and hordes of minders immediately surrounded us on the tarmac as we waited for the orchestra leader, Lorin Maazel, and his musicians to follow us down and take a "class photo" in front of a beaming mosaic of the Great Leader. The deputy minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, stepped forward to greet Maazel...
...dinner after the concert, an emotionally spent New York Philharmonic president Zarin Mehta said, "I'm over the moon right now." He said he had "misted up" at the playing of the U.S. national anthem in Pyongyang, and that the emotional power of the evening only grew from there. He was right. Several hard-bitten journalists, myself included, choked up at various points, and several orchestra members spoke of breaking down in the wings after leaving the stage as the audience continued to stand and applaud. U.S. diplomats, current and former, were euphoric. Donald Gregg, a former State Department...
...Reality Check "A Momentous Journey" is how the Phil's p.r. director Eric Latzky had called it in Beijing the day before the flight to Pyongyang. Immediately after the concert, he had seemed prescient. But momentous things sometimes last just a moment. This is still North Korea we're talking about. Kim Jong Il has run the place now for nearly 14 years. He has not, to date, shown himself to be an agent of change. He still runs a rogue regime, suspected recently of aiding Syria in building what Israeli intelligence believes to have been a nuclear-weapons facility...
...said. Another, a young man, said he was simply tired of the poverty he faced in a small village in the northeast corner of the country. Both hoped to make it to Seoul. "There is no future in our country," the young man told me. Can a single, scintillating concert help change that? After a euphoric evening in the unlikeliest of places, that's still up to Kim Jong Il. And he, alas, wasn't there...