WITNESS - In Pyongyang, a tale of two concerts

By Jon Herskovitz

PYONGYANG (Reuters) - In one concert hall, North Korea's elite opened their arms for the warmest embrace yet to people from their mortal enemy. In another, children sternly avoided eye contact with visiting Americans.

Last week's unprecedented concert by the New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang showed one of the world's most isolated states can be far more open than imaginable. But another concert the next day put that display into perspective.

Reclusive North Korea rolled the dice by allowing in the New York Philharmonic with the largest ever contingent of about 80 Western journalists, including myself.

One question on everyone's minds was, why this openness now?

For years I have had to cover North Korea from the distance of Seoul: reading its state news reports, watching its TV, speaking to refugees who left and to experts who have devoted their professional lives to trying to understand the place.

Pyongyang has interacted more internationally since a 2005 agreement to abandon its contentious nuclear weapons programmes, but that accord has become bogged down, and the country is almost as hermetically sealed as it was at the end of the 1950-53 Korean war.

So the official attitudes to visiting journalists were a surprise: when we came through the airport, they didn't even run us through customs and immigration -- although I am sure our bags were checked along the way.

They gave us unfettered broadband Internet access, did not block us from taking pictures, and even allowed us to interview people on the streets -- with minders and security agents hovering nearby.