Notes Of Hope

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But this is still Kim Jong Il's North Korea we're talking about--a rogue regime, with nukes that exports narcotics and possibly nuclear-weapons technology, that brutally suppresses its own people. It's not just our hotel that's Alcatraz; the entire country is a prison, and thousands risk their lives to escape. About a year and a half ago, I sat in a small apartment outside the town of Yanji in northeast China with two people who had recently fled the North. One, a young woman, told me how her mother had been hauled off to a political prison, where she had fallen ill and died. The other refugee, a young man, said he was simply tired of the poverty he faced in a small village. "There is no future in our country," he told me.

Can a concert, however scintillating, help change that? It's hard to know what ordinary North Koreans made of the event: the official newspaper buried the story on page 4. When he introduced Gershwin's An American in Paris, Maazel told the audience that perhaps one day another composer would write a famous symphony titled An American in Pyongyang. The crowd laughed--and applauded long and hard, endorsing the sentiment. But the possibility of that ever happening still lies with Kim Jong Il, and he didn't even turn up for the show.

Hermit Kingdom For more photos from the New York Philharmonic's trip to North Korea, go to time.com/philharmonic