Trade in Everything: Orchestral Manoeuvres in North Korea

From the AP:

Her mother's town was briefly occupied by

. Her father survived the communists during the

by hiding in the mountains.

"It just kind of feels that the stuff that happened in the past or what's going on there makes you feel uncomfortable," she said in a telephone interview.

The 106-member orchestra is leaving Thursday for a three-week Asian tour that culminates in a historic concert in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, on Feb. 26. The Philharmonic will spend two days in the North, a visit by an American cultural organization unprecedented since the Korean peninsula was divided in 1948.

Word of the trip came after

's Stalinist government agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. The visit has elicited hopeful comparisons to the 1970s pingpong diplomacy era that led to the restoration of U.S.-China relations after a 2 1/2-decade freeze. But it also drew criticism from those pointing to the millions of North Koreans facing starvation or imprisonment.

Philharmonic music director Lorin Maazel rejects such assertions, noting that he had conducted concerts in Brezhnev's

, Salazar's

and Franco's Spain.