Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The New York Philharmonic will play a concert in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, next week. I doubt that I am the only critic who finds this somewhere along the scale between morally inappropriate and aesthetically offensive.

The orchestra and its music director Lorin Maazel are at pains to insist that their visit, a late postlude to a long- planned Asia tour, was organized ``with the backing of the U.S. State Department'' and that they had put in a request ``the concert would be open to the average citizen.'' The Philharmonic will be traveling in an entourage of 280 people, 130 of whom are musicians. It is unlikely any will go to bed without supper.

The government of Kim Jong-Il, on the other hand, has made it a matter of state policy to starve its citizens over more than a decade by spending a fortune on nuclear tests and maintaining a rule of terror. Harvest failure and flooding in 2006 have further exacerbated one of the world's less-reported human disasters.

Human-rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, estimate that some two million North Koreans out of a population of 23.3 million have died of hunger; officials admit to 250,000.

CNN has shown graphic images of children in advanced stages of malnutrition, and the World Food Program is appealing for $100 million to combat continued shortages. Countless numbers of desperate people have risked life and liberty fleeing across the heavily patrolled southern border. About 9,000 are reckoned to have made it to safety.

Reign of Terror

It is against this backdrop that the Philharmonic, which was founded in 1842, is making a 48-hour stopover after concerts in China for a Feb. 26 concert that includes Dvorak's ``New World Symphony'' and Gershwin's ``An American in Paris.''

The orchestra will no doubt play in a hall packed to the rafters with the party leaders who organized the famine and those of their heavily vetted followers who can be trusted to mingle with foreigners. Any ``average citizen'' who gets into the hall probably can expect arrest. Kim Jong-Il, who inherited his father's personality cult, is likely to attend.

It may be that power players in Washington are happy with recent concessions by North Korea, which has put its nuclear program on ice since September. They may have endorsed this trip as a resumption of the cultural diplomacy that helped unfreeze the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the 1960s and with China the following decade.

Maazel, in a Feb. 20 article in the Wall Street Journal, declared that ``human rights are an issue of profound relevance to us all'' and argued that the gift of music can lead to better human understanding.

Orwellian Scenario

Previously, he told the Associated Press: ``People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw bricks, should they? Is our standing as a country -- the United States -- is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others.''

The unreality of these arguments is almost beyond disputation. North Korea is a rogue state that flouts international law, threatens nuclear war and starves its own people. The U.S. is a democracy which, despite lapses in its treatment of prisoners after 9/11, is committed to the rule of law and the rights of the individual. Any comparison is illusory.

That America's oldest and finest should play to the successors of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong as an act of cultural diplomacy was acceptable inasmuch as history had turned a page and successors had renounced their tyranny.

In North Korea, no page has been turned. The regime that U.S. President George W. Bush designated as part of an ``Axis of Evil'' has neither fallen nor shown any willingness to change. Its leaders will broadcast the concert and proclaim it a victory for their ideology.

Maazel, 77, who has written an opera titled ``1984,'' failed to decipher this Orwellian scenario. The Philharmonic is being used in a game it neither understands nor plays professionally.

Music is the loser in this transaction, a poisoned pawn on a dirty board.

For more information on the New York Philharmonic and its Asian tour, go to http://nyphil.org. The tour is sponsored by Credit Suisse Group.

(Norman Lebrecht is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Norman Lebrecht at norman@normanlebrecht.com.

Last Updated: February 21, 2008 16:10 EST