My great admiration is sent to the New York Philharmonic and Glass Notes friend and NY Times critic Steve Smith. Both have traveled to North Korea for a concert of Dvorak, Gershwin and Wagner along with the Star Spangled Banner and the North Korean National Anthem with a promised encore of a beloved Korean folk song.
For all the rhetoric, the magic of the whole trip is that the orchestra is there to play music, and there’s nothing more to the story than that. It takes great courage by many good people to attempt something like this, and for that, they all have my respect.
Now if we could just convince the NY Phil to perform some PG…
Musical Diplomacy?