Word: orchestras
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...emotion. North Korean and U.S. flags stood at either end of the stage, and the entire audience rose as both nations' anthems were played. From that point on, for the next two hours, it was hard to remember that during the bus ride that afternoon, the members of the orchestra and the journalists accompanying them had passed a poster of a giant fist slamming a helpless little Uncle Sam that read, "Smash...
...sidelines of this week's concert? Unlikely. Though the U.S. State Department has been resolutely (critics would say bizarrely) upbeat about the nuclear agreement Pyongyang signed in the so-called six-party talks last year, even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to temper the optimism surrounding the orchestra's visit. "The North Korean regime is the North Korean regime," she told reporters before attending the inauguration of South Korea's new President Lee Myung Bak in Seoul on Monday. "I don't think we should get carried away with what listening to [the concert] is going...
...frigid Monday afternoon, under a fading sun and a beaming visage of Kim Il Sung, the late "Great Leader" of North Korea, the music director of the New York Philharmonic orchestra today led the largest American contingent since the end of the Korean war into Pyongyang, the capital city of the world's most isolated regime. When Lorin Maazel stepped off a chartered Asiana Airlines 747 from Beijing and shook the hand of North Korea's deputy minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, the Gershwin offensive had begun...
...concert Tuesday night in Pyongyang, before 1,400 North Koreans, the orchestra played An American in Paris, part of an artistic adventure that has whipped up excitement not just in musical circles but in diplomatic ones. When the Philharmonic's visit was announced, images of the Ping-Pong diplomacy of an earlier era were revived. In 1971 the visit to Beijing by a group of U.S. table tennis players foreshadowed the end of China's Cold War-era seclusion and a new era in relations between Washington and Beijing. Now, the Philharmonic's concert comes as Pyongyang shuts down...
...musicians, that is surely true enough. Unless Tehran someday beckons as the next stop in an "axis of evil" tour, there can be no stranger venue than Pyongyang for some of the world's finest musicians to play. The buses that transported the orchestra, staff and some 80 foreign journalists (three times the number that accompanied then Secretary of State Madeline Albright for her meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in late 2000) rolled past building after building that was unlit in the late afternoon gloom; pedestrians on the streets stared as the fleet of buses rolled into...