When in Pyongyang.(The Talk of the Town)(Lorin Maazel)(Interview)

With the New York Philharmonic slated to make its Pyongyang debut this week, Lorin Maazel, the music director, confessed to some trepidation about the visit. ("I wrote an opera called '1984.' Can that be clearer?") But, some weeks ago, with visions of 1971 Ping-Pong diplomacy in mind, Maazel decided that the concert, which will be broadcast live across North Korea, warranted a few remarks ("introducing music, not talking about North Korean gulags") from the conductor. "It seemed only appropriate, with the North Koreans sitting in the audience and the Americans sitting onstage, that there be some kind of verbal bridge, a 'We're happy to be here and this is what we're playing and hope you enjoy the concert' sort of thing--just by way of breaking the ice," he explained over the phone last week from Hong Kong, where the Philharmonic was halfway through a tour that was to culminate in concerts in both North and South Korea.

Maazel, who speaks French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian, but not Korean, didn't want a translator in the middle of his ice-breaking. He resolved to deliver his remarks in Korean, assisted by a trick of his own devising: as he had for an appearance in Japan, he would write a musical score to complement a more conventional phonetic transliteration of his remarks in Korean. "The Japanese people couldn't believe it, because it sounded very authentic," Maazel said, recalling his first experiment with the method. "You know, pitch goes up, drops, gets faster, slower." In much the same manner, his Pyongyang score would cue him on cadence and rhythm and all the other elements of speech that get lost in transliteration and can easily tip the scales between intelligibility and gibberish.

"You can't know these things by looking at the phonetics," Maazel said. "I used to go with my phrase book to small towns in Japan. People would be on the ground laughing so hard, because God knows what I was saying. They knew what I was trying to say, obviously. 'Where is such and such a temple,' or whatever. But the pronunciation was all wrong, and I was probably saying, you know, 'The fishmonger is an idiot and ought to be hanged' or something."

A couple of weeks ago, Maazel had his Pyongyang remarks translated into Korean, and he downloaded a recording of them to his iPhone, then flew to Hong Kong for the start of the tour. In Taipei, he prevailed upon a few Korean-speaking members of the orchestra, foremost among them Michelle Kim, a violinist, to help translate his words into music.

This translation, which Kim and Maazel sketched out on manuscript paper, features a standard ...