Shostakovich and Kim Jong Il

Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, is in no mood for platitudes when it comes to the New York Philharmonic's plans to perform for Big Brother in Kim Jong Il's North Korea.

Teachout begins his essay on the subject this week by describing a new concert format developed by musicologist Gerard McBurney in his series 'Beyond the Score' with the Chicago Symphony. McBurney introduces audiences to the cultural and historical situations surrounding the composition of the music they are about to hear before the music is performed. In New York the format proved especially effective, he reports, in the Philharmonic's presentation of the Shostakovich Fourth Symphony. The Fourth, written in response to alarming developments in Stalin's Russia, can be difficult for audiences. Presentations by and F. Murray Abraham introduced them to the composer's situation and the audience had a way in. Teachout reports that he 'never heard a more heartfelt ovation for a Shostakovich symphony.'

The ovation, though, had a context of its own.

Yet it seems highly likely that more than a few of the people who were clapping so enthusiastically were also looking at the players onstage and asking, What are they thinking? For three days earlier, Zarin Mehta and Paul Guenther, the president and chairman of the Philharmonic, had shared a platform with Pak Gil Yon, North Korea's ambassador to the United Nations, and announced that America's oldest orchestra would be playing in Pyongyang next February. It horrified me--no other word is strong enough--to see them sitting next to a smirking representative of Kim Jong Il, the dictator of a brutally totalitarian state in whose Soviet-style prison camps 150,000 political prisoners are currently doing slave labor.

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I leave it to more qualified observers to predict whether anything of value will emerge from [international] negotiations. But it is not the job of the New York Philharmonic to enact foreign policy, much less to besmirch its own honour by taking part in what, in a previous column on this topic, I called "a puppet show whose purpose is to lend legitimacy to a despicable regime." Nor do you have to be a diplomat to know that Mr. Guenther was blowing smoke when he compared the trip to the 1989 concert that Leonard Bernstein and members of the Philharmonic gave at the soon-to-be-dismantled Berlin Wall. Nobody is tearing down any walls in North Korea.

After overturning a similarly glib statement from Mehta, Teachout wonders what conductor Lorin Maazel thinks of his new assignment. Maazel once composed an opera version of George Orwell's 1984; does he now look forward to lending his orchestra's prestige to Big Brother? Finally Teachout turns to this:

How might the Philharmonic emerge from this misbegotten venture with its honour intact? The answer came from the musician who accompanied me to last Friday's concert. In the hush that followed the rage and anguish of the first movement of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, she leaned over to me and whispered, "Forget Gershwin--this is what they ought to play in North Korea." And so they should. Instead of handing out musical bonbons to Kim Jong Il, Mr. Maazel and the Philharmonic could pay tribute to his innocent victims by performing a piece that speaks with shattering eloquence of the devastation wrought on an equally innocent people by an equally vicious tyrant.

Music, Mr. Guenther told us last week, is "a universal language." If so, the Philharmonic would do well to change its Pyongyang program so that the right message will come through loud and clear.

Shostakovich would surely agree.

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Kim Jong-Il photo from MSNBC.

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