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    ‘Beyond Utopia’ Review: Exit Strategies

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    This film, directed by Madeleine Gavin, documents the experiences of defectors from North Korea.“Beyond Utopia,” a documentary on defectors from North Korea, begins by pre-empting the inevitable questions about how it was made. “The film contains no recreations,” the opening titles explain. The footage, we are told, was shot by the filmmakers, the subjects and operatives in the underground network that helped those subjects escape.That access alone gives the movie an intense interest. Directed by the longtime editor Madeleine Gavin, “Beyond Utopia” pivots around Seungeun Kim, a pastor in South Korea who has spent more than two decades assisting North Koreans who want to escape the totalitarian regime. The precarious course to safety generally runs through multiple countries.There are two main rescue missions chronicled in the film. One involves Soyeon Lee, a past defector who lives in South Korea and is trying to retrieve her son from the North. At the time this documentary was shot, the boy was 17, and she had not seen him in 10 years. Does he want to defect? The mother believes so, although communication is difficult, and there is no choice but to trust middlemen.The other mission involves the Ro family — a mother, father, two children and a grandmother who have, at the time Pastor Kim gets word of them, successfully crossed the heavily guarded Yalu River, which separates North Korea from China. But they need the pastor’s network to shuttle them through Southeast Asia. Until they reach Thailand, they will be at constant risk of being returned. Some of the people who cross, Pastor Kim says, wind up being sold for sex trafficking or organ harvesting.The family’s journey forms the backbone of the film, and not only because “Beyond Utopia” has some footage of them navigating the jungle by night. (Who could even keep a camera going under those circumstances?) There is also a chance to see them adapt to an unfamiliar — and, to them, practically unbelievable — environment, and to see their reactions as they realize what they learned in North Korea was wrong. “I feel like our country must become more developed,” says the grandmother, once they have reached Vietnam. “I mean I know how intelligent our Marshal Kim Jong-un is, so are our people just not smart?”“Beyond Utopia” fills out these stories with the history of North Korea, a country that Sue Mi Terry, a former C.I.A. analyst and a producer on the film, describes as “the only communist Confucian hereditary dynasty in the world.” Defectors like the activist Hyeonseo Lee fill in the picture on what life is like there, and how propaganda could convince the North Korean populace that they are living in a utopia.The engrossing, often tense proceedings are slightly marred by a pushy score. All the same, being able to experience the escape alongside these subjects greatly distinguishes this documentary.Beyond UtopiaRated PG-13. Descriptions of torture and brutality. In English and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Germany Celebrates Wolf Biermann, a Singer Who United East and West

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      A show at the German Historical Museum honors Wolf Biermann, whose music and moral stance endeared him to audiences across the once divided country.If passers-by on a busy bridge in central Berlin on a recent summer afternoon recognized East Germany’s most famous songwriter, poet and dissident, they did not show it.Posing for this article’s photographs in front of a huge wrought iron eagle that featured on one of his best known record sleeves, Wolf Biermann, 86, smiled and tried joking with the afternoon crowd. But the office workers and tourists ignored him and continued their journeys across the river.Nearly five decades after Biermann was thrown out of East Germany for criticizing its totalitarian Communist government, the German Historical Museum is honoring him with a major exhibition. Biermann may not be recognized on the street, but the show, which opens Friday and runs through Jan. 14, 2024, proves he is far from forgotten: He is the first living person in recent memory to be the subject of such an exhibition at Germany’s national history museum.In a life that crisscrossed the East-West border that once divided Germany, Biermann’s music and principled moral stance made him a rare figure who transcended that barrier. Now, his tale is a perfect one for the united Germany to celebrate.“His story is both East German and West German history,” said Monika Boll, the exhibition’s curator. “You can’t get more German than that.”Biermann was born under Nazism, in 1936, and raised in West Germany. As a teenager, he defected to the East and made a career as a singer of witty, folk-inspired songs — until an anti-authoritarian streak in his music began to trouble the Communist authorities. For a decade from the mid-60s, Biermann’s songs, many of which he recorded in his East Berlin apartment, were smuggled to the West and released by record labels there, then smuggled back behind the iron curtain.After a 1976 concert in Cologne, West Germany, in which he criticized the government of East Germany, Biermann was barred from re-entering that country, where he had made his home.Barbara Klemm/Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungYet Biermann wanted to stay in the German Democratic Republic, or G.D.R. Although he was the subject of a yearslong state surveillance operation, he was never imprisoned, unlike many other critics of the government. The authorities worried about a backlash from West Germany, where the press was taking special note of Biermann’s career.In a speech at the exhibition opening on Wednesday, Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, compared Biermann to a “raised middle finger” aimed at the “pride of the G.D.R. leadership.” The opening’s guests included many former East German dissidents, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s former chancellor.In an interview, Biermann said that his life story was instructive for anyone who wants to understand Germany’s complicated postwar past. “I’m the ideal counterpoint,” Bierman said, to what was typical in those decades. “To recognize what was normal, you need to look at the exception,” he added.Right from his childhood, he did the opposite of everyone around him, he added. His family was staunchly communist, he recalled, and his father was Jewish. Naturally, he said, they detested the Nazis — unlike most German families at the time.Even the British fire bombing of his hometown, Hamburg, which he only survived by diving into a canal with his mother, did not stop Biermann rooting for the Allies. In a song, he later wrote:And because I was born under the yellow starIn GermanyThat is why we took the English bombsLike gifts from heaven.His father, Dagobert Biermann, a labor organizer, was murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis when Biermann was 6.In 1953, swimming against the historical tide, the 16-year-old Biermann moved, alone, from West Germany to the East, just as thousands were fleeing in the other direction in search of a better life. But as a convinced Communist, Biermann thought it was the G.D.R., not the capitalist West, that offered a more just and moral vision.Right from his childhood, Biermann said, he did the opposite of everyone around him.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesA talent for music was recognized during his tenure as a production assistant at Berthold Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theater, where he had been hired by Brecht’s widow. Supported by politically connected sponsors, Biermann had gained minor notice as a singer-songwriter by 1960. If his lyrics offended some, he got away with it because of his communist bone fides, including the fact that his father was killed by fascists.But soon his lyrics and texts became too critical of the government and, in 1965, the authorities — which had tight control over cultural life — de facto banned Biermann from performing, recording or publishing in East Germany.During the 11 years in which he was also not allowed to leave the country, Biermann’s apartment became his stage and recording studio, and he was under constant watch. Over the decades, the East German state security services, known as the Stasi, watched and bugged his home, followed his car, listened to his phone calls and tried to recruit his friends and lovers.“You could say he was in the champion league — such a level of surveillance was atypical,” said Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian who has studied Biermann’s Stasi file.Biermann responded ironically with “The Ballad of the Stasi,” in which he commiserates with the poor “Stasi dogs” monitoring him, who would probably end up singing his songs in bed.East German fans who were caught with Biermann’s music on bootleg cassette tapes or handbills of his verse could be arrested and locked away for years. But his apartment, which was close to the main border crossing point into West Berlin, still became a gathering place for dissident artists and thinkers. American stars, like Joan Baez and Allen Ginsburg, also visited him there.A turning point in Biermann’s career came in 1976, with a three-and-half-hour concert he gave to a sold-out hall in Cologne, on a rare visit to West Germany. He came out swinging against the “old comrades” who ran East Germany, and painted a bleak picture of life behind the wall. Three days later, while watching the news on television, he learned that he had been permanently barred from re-entry to East Germany.Demonstrators in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall Fell. The placard, in German, reads, “We want our old singer Biermann back!”Archiv Wolf Biermann; Staatsbibliothek–PK/Abteilung Handschriften und historische Drucke Biermann said he was crestfallen to be shut out of the country he held so dear, despite all its shortcomings. While hundreds of people were risking their lives crossing illegally to the West, Biermann’s heart pined for the East. “With me, everything was always the other way around — that’s almost the fundamental law,” he said.Biermann’s expulsion led to protests by East Germany’s most famous artists, writers and actors, and the government reacted with further repressions on artistic expression that remained in place until the fall of the Berlin Wall, 13 years later.After Germany’s 1990 reunification — in which he played an important role — Biermann remained active, though less in the spotlight. He continued to be a respected figure on the German left, even as he voiced unpopular opinions among his comrades: He supported the American-led war in Iraq, and criticized the peace movement that grew against it.Standing in front of the bridge’s wrought iron eagle in Berlin, Biermann recalled writing one of his most popular songs, “The Ballad of the Prussian Icarus,” after he and Ginsburg crossed the bridge in 1976 and took pictures in front of the bird. They made a bet over which of them would bring the iron creature into verse, Biermann recalled.That song, which became one of his best known, is typical Biermann, a lyrical critique of the East German state that notes:The barbed wire slowly grows deepInto the skin, the chest and boneInto the brain’s gray cellsAs tourist boats passed under its perch on the bridge, the same eagle looked out on a very different world. If Biermann now has an official place in German history, it’s because of the part he played in shaping it.Wolf Biermann: A Poet and Songwriter From GermanyThrough Jan. 14, 2024, at the German Historical Museum, in Berlin; dhm.de. More

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      Alexander Toradze, Idiosyncratic Pianist, Dies at 69

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      A defector to the U.S., he was admired for his prowess in the Russian repertory, but his individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire.”Alexander Toradze, a Georgian American pianist and Soviet defector whose idiosyncratic and bravura performances of Russian composers were either loved or hated, died on May 11 at his home in South Bend, Ind. He was 69.The cause was heart failure, his health having been deteriorating since 2019, his manager, Ettore F. Volontieri, said.Mr. Toradze was also stricken with heart failure, as it was later diagnosed, on April 23 during a performance with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Washington State. Though he had to be helped onstage at the start because of weakness, he completed the concert and was hospitalized afterward, Mr. Volontieri said.Mr. Toradze specialized in Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and other Russian composers. His concerts this spring were to include a performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Illinois Philharmonic, scheduled for May 14.Mr. Toradze, whom friends and colleagues called Lexo, won the silver medal at the 1977 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, though members of the jury were divided, with some finding his playing disturbingly percussive.The critic Peter G. Davis, however, was among his fans: He wrote in The New York Times two years later that “his playing had the best sort of éclat and brilliance in that it stemmed directly from the character of the music rather than from a desire to show off.”“His tone,” he added, “was glittering but never clattery; the poise and precision of his interpretation had elegance as well as tremendous visceral excitement.”In a 1984 review, Donal Henahan of The Times wrote of Mr. Toradze’s playing, “It is the distinctive Russian style of an older generation, still alive in this era of stamped-out international virtuosos.”Mr. Toradze defected to the United States in 1983, presenting himself at the American Embassy in Madrid for asylum during a tour with the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra. According to the critic and author Joseph Horowitz, a close friend and artistic adviser to Mr. Toradze, it was a dramatic defection that involved highway chases in Spain and an attempted kidnapping by the K.G.B. in a restaurant.Mr. Toradze in 2001. His idiosyncratic performances tended to divide critics, with some loving his style and others finding it disturbing.Chris Lee for The New York TimesThree months later, Mr. Toradze embarked on an American tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. During his career he performed with major U.S. orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, as well as the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, among others.In 1991, he was appointed to a newly endowed professorship in piano at Indiana University South Bend, where he created the Toradze Piano Studio, inspired by the intense, all-encompassing training of Soviet music schools. His studio consisted of former and current students, who presented mostly Russian repertory in marathon concerts in the United States and Europe.His students also played soccer, and the Toradze Studio team won the university championship three years in a row. “Soccer is not very good for the hands,” Mr. Toradze told The Times in 2002, “but it’s great for the brain.”A gregarious host, he enjoyed giving late-night dinners and boisterous parties for his students, many of whom he recruited from Russia and Georgia. He retired from the university in 2017.While he was widely admired, Mr. Toradze’s individualistic approach “was not for everyone — or for all repertoire,” Mr. Horowitz wrote in an appreciation published after Mr. Toradze’s death. “Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was one piece that could not survive a Lexo onslaught.”The Times critic Bernard Holland, reviewing a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1988, wrote that Mr. Toradze’s “customary extravagance would have ill fit this music’s classical restraint, so his tactic was to seek the other extreme.” The results, he said, “alternated between the weird and the inaudible.”Mr. Toradze acknowledged such responses. “I always anticipate outraged attacks,” he said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun in 1992.Alexander Davidovich Toradze was born on May 30, 1952, in Tbilisi, Georgia, to the composer David Toradze and the actress Liana Asatiani. He attended the Special Music School for Gifted Children in Tbilisi and the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1978.While he was a student in Moscow, Mr. Toradze listened to illicit broadcasts of the Voice of America program “Jazz Hour.” To him, he said, jazz represented artistic freedom. When performing in Portland, Ore., during a Soviet-sponsored tour in 1978, he learned that Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson were to perform twice the next day. Much to the irritation of his manager, he decided to skip a rehearsal in Miami to attend the concerts. Ms. Fitzgerald invited him onstage, where he told her that she was a “goddess for people in the Soviet Union.”Mr. Toradze’s small catalog of recordings includes a 1998 disc of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra, and Shostakovich piano concertos, with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.Mr. Toradze, a practicing Orthodox Christian, advised young artists to get in the habit of praying before performances. Speaking about Liszt’s variations on a theme of Bach, he told The Times in 1986: “Bach’s cantata describes worrying, complaining, doubting and crying. Many of these feelings were part of my life. But the piece moves steadily and heavily toward a fantastic final chorale in major, with the words, ‘What God does is well done.’ That is my credo.”His marriage to the pianist Susan Blake ended in divorce in 2002. He is survived by his sons, David and Alex; a sister, Nino Toradze; and his longtime partner, the pianist Siwon Kim.After defecting to the United States, Mr. Toradze lamented the imposition of strict union rules regarding rehearsal times that could prevent an orchestra from practicing to the end of a concerto, even if the musicians were just a few bars short. But he appreciated the high-quality instruments on offer.“In Russia, I would play many times on pianos with broken strings or broken keys,” he told the radio host Bruce Duffie in 2002.But, he added, “there are times when the piano is not well, or you are not well, but you go on anyway.” More

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      Fou Ts’ong, Famed Chinese Pianist, Dies of Covid-19 at 86

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFou Ts’ong, Pianist Whose Family Letters Inspired a Generation, Dies at 86Driven from China during Mao’s rule, Mr. Fou kept up a correspondence with his father that became a beloved book in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.Fou Ts’ong in 1960. He was one of the first pianists from China to win international renown.Credit…Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesDec. 31, 2020, 4:59 a.m. ETFou Ts’ong, a Chinese pianist known for his sensitive interpretations of Chopin, Debussy and Mozart, and whose letters from his father, a noted translator and writer, influenced a generation of Chinese readers, died on Monday at a hospital in London, where he had lived for many years. He was 86.The cause was the coronavirus, said Patsy Toh, a pianist, who had been married to Mr. Fou since 1975.In 1955, Mr. Fou became one of the first Chinese pianists to achieve global prominence when he took third place in the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, also winning a special prize for his performance of Chopin’s mazurkas.Almost overnight, he became a national hero at home. To China’s nascent Communist-led government, Mr. Fou’s recognition in a well-known international competition was proof that the country could stand on its own artistically in the West. Chinese reporters flocked to interview Mr. Fou, while many others sought out his father, Fu Lei, a prominent translator of French literature, for advice on child-rearing.But the authorities’ good will did not last long.Two years later, Mao Zedong initiated the Anti-Rightist Campaign, during which hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals, including Mr. Fu, were persecuted. Many were tortured and banished to labor camps. Mr. Fou, then studying at the Warsaw Conservatory in Poland, was made to return to China to undergo “rectification” for several months.Not long after going back to Warsaw, Mr. Fou found himself in a quandary. Having witnessed the increasingly tumultuous political climate back home, he knew that if he returned to China upon graduation — as the government expected him to do — he would be expected to denounce his father, an unimaginable situation.So in December 1958, Mr. Fou fled then-Communist Poland for London, where he claimed political asylum.“About my leaving, I always felt full of regret and anguish,” he later recalled in an interview. So many intellectuals in China had suffered, he said, but he had escaped. “I felt uneasy, as if I owed something to all my friends,” he added.After his defection to London, Mr. Fou maintained a written correspondence with his father in Shanghai — a special privilege that was said to have been personally approved by Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier.Then, in 1966, Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of chaos that upended Chinese society. Militant Red Guards accused Mr. Fu, a prolific translator of writers like Balzac and Voltaire, of having “capitalistic” artistic taste, among other crimes. They humiliated and tortured the scholar and his wife for days until the couple, like many other Chinese, were driven to suicide. Mr. Fou, still in London, did not learn of his parents’ deaths until several months later.In 1981, after China’s post-Mao government posthumously restored the reputations of Mr. Fou’s parents, a volume of letters written by his father, primarily to Mr. Fou, was published in China. Full of advice, encouragement, life teachings and stern paternal love, the book, “Fu Lei’s Family Letters,” became an instant best seller in China.For many, the long disquisitions on music, art and life offered a welcome contrast to the Cultural Revolution years, which saw sons turn against fathers, students against teachers and neighbors against neighbors — all in the name of politics.“If you imagine the environment we grew up with, it was very rigid,” said Xibai Xu, a political analyst who first read the letters in middle school in Beijing. He added, “So when you read ‘Fu Lei’s Family Letters,’ you realized how a decent human life could be — a life that is very delicate and artistic, with real human emotions and not just ideology.”Besides influencing a generation of Chinese, Mr. Fu’s words resonated long after his death with the person for whom they were originally intended.“My father had a saying that ‘First you must be a person, then an artist, and then a musician, and only then can you be a pianist,’” Mr. Fou once recalled in an interview. “Even now, I believe in this order — that it should be this way and that I am this way.”Mr. Fou performing in New York City in 2006.Credit…Nan Melville for The New York TimesFou Ts’ong was born on March 10, 1934, in Shanghai. His father, in addition to being a translator, was an art critic and a curator. His mother, Zhu Meifu, was a secretary to her husband.Under the strict supervision of their father, Mr. Fou and his brother, Fu Min, were educated in the classical Chinese tradition, and they grew up surrounded by both Western and Chinese cultural influences. As a child, Mr. Fou studied art, philosophy and music, frequently making use of his father’s phonograph and extensive record collection.A lover of classical music from a young age, Mr. Fou began taking piano lessons when he was 7. He later studied under a number of teachers, including Mario Paci, the Italian conductor of the Shanghai Philharmonic.But the chaos of wartime China prevented the young pianist from receiving a systematic musical education. In 1948, Mr. Fou, then in his teens, moved with his family to the southwestern province of Yunnan, where he went through what he described as a rebellious period. It was only after returning to Shanghai several years later that he began to dedicate himself in earnest to the piano.In 1952, Mr. Fou made his first stage appearance, playing Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. The concert caught the attention of officials in Beijing, who selected the young pianist to compete and tour in Eastern Europe, Mr. Fou’s first trip abroad.Soon, Mr. Fou moved to Poland, where he studied at the Warsaw Conservatory on a scholarship. To prepare for the fifth Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1955, he practiced so diligently that he hurt his fingers and was nearly cut from the first round of competition.After the deaths of his parents in 1966, Mr. Fou stayed abroad, rising to become a renowned concert pianist on the international circuit. Though he was best known for his interpretations of Chopin, he also received acclaim for his performances of works by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Debussy. In a review of a 1987 recital in New York, the critic Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times of Mr. Fou’s “sensitive ear for color” and “elusive gift of melody.”“We should hear Mr. Fou more often,” Mr. Holland wrote. “He is an artist who uses his considerable pianistic gifts in pursuit of musical goals and not for show.”In 1979, after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Fou was granted permission to return to China for the first time in more than two decades, reuniting with his brother to hold a memorial service for their parents.On subsequent visits, Mr. Fou gave performances and lectures; he became known to many Chinese as the “Piano Poet” for his lyrical musical interpretations. Later versions of “Fu Lei’s Family Letters” were updated to include some of Mr. Fou’s letters to his father.Mr. Fou’s death came at a time of resurgent nationalism in China. On Chinese social media, some ultranationalist commentators called him a traitor to the country for having defected decades ago, echoing similar accusations that Mr. Fou faced in the 1950s not long after settling in London.“What would I tell them? There was nothing to say,” Mr. Fou once said of such critics in an interview. “It’s not that I was longing for the West.”“I was choosing freedom,” he added. “It was not an easy situation. There was no other choice.”Many other Chinese honored his memory, including well-known pianists like Li Yundi as well as Lang Lang, who called Mr. Fou “a clear stream in the world of classical music and a beacon of light in our spirit.”Mr. Fou in Chengdu, China, in 2007. The pianist Lang Lang called him “a clear stream in the world of classical music.”Credit…VCG/VCG, via Getty Images“Fou Ts’ong’s legacy was to show people and musicians the importance of integrity, character and music beyond technique,” said Jindong Cai, a conductor and the director of the U.S.-China Music Institute at Bard College Conservatory of Music.Mr. Fou’s first marriage, to Zamira Menuhin, daughter of the prominent violinist Yehudi Menuhin, ended in divorce, as did a brief marriage to Hijong Hyun. In addition to Ms. Toh, Mr. Fou is survived by a son from his first marriage, Lin Xiao; a son from his marriage to Ms. Toh, Lin Yun; and his brother, Mr. Fu.Mr. Fou remained passionately devoted to music in his later years, playing piano for hours every day even as his fingers grew frail. It was a love that he invoked often in interviews, alongside nuggets of wisdom from his father.“When I was very young, I wrote to my father from Poland that I was sad and lonely,” he once recalled. “He wrote back: ‘You could never be lonely. Don’t you think you are living with the greatest souls of the history of mankind all the time?’”“Now that’s how I feel, always,” Mr. Fou said.Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More