Word: pyongyang
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Foreign correspondents can be a pretty jaded lot, full of a world-weariness that's partly feigned but partly real. But nobody was feeling--or even pretending to be--blasé aboard the chartered Asiana Airlines 747 from Beijing as it bore down on Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, on Feb. 25 carrying the New York Philharmonic orchestra and 80 mostly U.S. journalists. For many of us, North Korea has long been as remote as the dark side of the moon, so we were more than eager to get a look at it. Television cameramen jostled for position in window...
...musicians to have a group picture taken in front of a beaming mosaic of the Great Leader. The minders, whose forced conviviality didn't hide the tension in their faces, would not leave our side until about 44 hours later, when we got on a flight out of Pyongyang...
...afternoon, we had passed a poster of a giant fist slamming a helpless little Uncle Sam that read, "Smash the USA." When he introduced George Gershwin's An American in Paris, Maazel told the audience that perhaps one day another composer would write a symphony entitled "An American in Pyongyang." Whatever ambivalence the North Korean audience may have felt until then evaporated. The crowd laughed - and applauded long and hard. "From that point on," Maazel later said, "you could just feel the warmth in the room...
...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...