North Korea removes anti-U.S. posters ahead of New York Philharmonic concert

Burt Herman, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BEIJING - North Korea was tearing down anti-American posters that line the streets of Pyongyang in preparation for the New York Philharmonic's unprecedented visit, the ensemble's president said Sunday on the eve of departure.

The musicians said they hoped personal contacts with North Koreans could help bring the countries closer. But some also worried their performance Tuesday wouldn't change anything, and instead be misused for propaganda in the communist country that technically remains at war with the U.S.

The Philharmonic's president and executive director, Zarin Mehta, said North Korea had met the group's requests that the largest possible audience hear the concert. The performance will be staged in a larger hall and will be broadcast live on radio and TV.

The concert will feature Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 and George Gershwin's "An American in Paris." Among the encores planned is the Korean folk song "Arirang," beloved in both the North and South.

Philharmonic musicians will also hold master classes for North Korean students and play chamber music with members of the North's State Symphony Orchestra.

"There's going to be major interaction with their musical community, and that's what we wanted to do," Mehta told The Associated Press in Beijing, where the orchestra played before its 48-hour trip to the North. "We didn't want to go in and do a closed little concert and drive out."

Mehta said a diplomat based in Pyongyang who briefed the orchestra told them the North was removing some of the anti-American propaganda earlier seen on the streets of the capital, Pyongyang.

The content of the posters removed was not immediately known. But such posters have portrayed iron-faced North Korean soldiers with rifles poised to strike cowering Americans or crushing Washington's Capitol dome, the U.S. flag in tatters.

"They are so anxious for us to come, we understand all those posters are going away," Mehta said.

Despite that claim, North Korea's state-controlled media kept up the vitriol Sunday, with the main Rodong Sinmun newspaper condemning "U.S. warmongers" for staging joint military exercises with South Korea that brought the peninsula "to the brink of a war."

The Tuesday performance will begin with the orchestra playing the national anthems of both countries, and Mehta said the U.S. and North Korean flags will stand side-by-side on stage.

Mehta, who visited North Korea twice last year to organize the event, said one of his first considerations was making sure all the orchestra's members of various nationalities, which include eight ethnic-Koreans, would be allowed to participate.

North Koreans were surprised the group was so diverse, one of the discussions that Mehta said illustrates how the visit will open the eyes of the isolated country's 23 million people.

It was not known whether North Korean leader Kim Jong Il would attend the concert, and Philharmonic spokesman Eric Latzky said the group had not directly extended an invitation to him.

The Canadian Press, 2008