S. Korean violinist wants border concert with North Korea

Violinist Won Hyung Joon wants to bring North and South Korean musicians together next month to perform on each side of the world's most heavily armed border. Standing in the way is the rivals' long, frustrating inability to move past their painful shared history.

Won says North Korean diplomats in Berlin have tentatively signed off on a plan for a renowned German conductor to lead a 70-member South Korean orchestra through Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the Korean folk tune "Arirang" while accompanied by a choir of 70 North Koreans just across the border on Aug. 15, the 70th anniversary of the 1945 liberation of a single Korea from Japan's 35-year colonial rule.
     
Wary South Korean officials, however, want a more formal endorsement from Pyongyang before they give their agreement to a concert at the border village of Panmunjom, where an armistice ended the three-year Korean War in 1953. Won and his German partners are pushing for that formal go-ahead from Pyongyang.
     
Dozens of Korean musicians joining their instruments and voices in harmony across the border, Won says, could dramatically illustrate the continuing tragedy of the Korean Peninsula, which, after liberation from Japan, was divided into a pro-U.S South and Soviet-backed North and remains in a technical state of war because a peace treaty formally ending the eventual Korean War has never been settled.
     
"We won't be able to talk to each other or hug each other. We'll just stand face to face and commune through music," Won said. "We want to do something meaningful at a meaningful place on a meaningful day."
     
First, though, he has to win support from two governments whose reluctance to cooperate, even on the most seemingly mild proposals, is often...