NY Philharmonic says Cuba tour prospects promising

[July 13, 2009]  HAVANA (AP) -- Prospects for Cuban performances by the New York Philharmonic look promising following a tour of concert halls and meetings with music officials on the island, orchestra president Zarin Mehta said Sunday.

Mehta said a final decision will be made by the Philharmonic's board of directors. Eric Latzky, the orchestra's vice president for communications, said an official announcement could be as much as a month off.

But Mehta said the trip looks promising, with tentative plans for performances on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 at the 900-seat Teatro Amadeo Roldan, a renovated concert hall a few blocks from the Malecon coastal highway.

"We have to go back now and work on repertoires, budgets. There are practical considerations like: how do you get the instruments in, where do you store them?" Mehta told The Associated Press in Havana. The Philharmonic's incoming music director, Alan Gilbert, would conduct.

The island's Culture Ministry invited the orchestra to perform in Havana, and U.S. officials have agreed to allow the musicians to visit under an exemption to legal restrictions on travel to Cuba, Latzky said.

The Communist Party daily Granma reported on Saturday that authorities were looking forward to such a tour, which would be among the most high-profile American cultural exchanges with communist Cuba since Fidel Castro's rebels came to power a half-century ago.

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra made a celebrated tour of Cuba a decade ago.

Mehta said the orchestra is concentrating on people rather than politicians: "We just want to come and play music and let others worry about the politics. That's their problem."

He noted that no major change in U.S.-North Korean relations occurred after the orchestra played in the North Korean capital in February 2008, the first performance by a major visiting orchestra in that totalitarian state.

Still, Mehta said, the music did seem to touch many of the North Korean concertgoers, who included government officials and military officers.

"Here you have all these people who have been taught that Americans are the devil," he said. "When we played a Korean piece, you should have seen the change in the stoic, impassive faces of the Koreans. Many of them were weeping."

The New York Philharmonic has a long tradition of musical diplomacy. The late Leonard Bernstein led America's oldest philharmonic orchestra in a watershed tour of the Soviet Union in 1959, and later in communist China and Eastern Bloc countries in the 1980s.

Mehta said some of the visiting musicians might give masters classes to Cuban students and allow them to sit in on dress rehearsals.

___

On the Net:

New York Philharmonic: http://www.nyphil.org/

[Associated Press; By ANITA SNOW]

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.