Word: concertized
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...real Bette Midler, chantootsie extraordinaire, got the crowd to sing along with "The Rose" while waving their cell phones like cigarette lighters at a '60s concert. Still, she's at her best not so much in the pop ballads that gave her mid-career a Top 40 lift, as in a plaintive ballad like John Prine's "Hello in There," or her rave-up of "When a Man Loves a Woman." They're terrific songs, and prove the lady's still got the lung power. (Does she take requests? Please, then, an encore of her late-70s gut-destroyer "Stay...
...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...
...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...