BEIJING — North Korea was tearing down anti-American posters that line the streets of Pyongyang in preparation for the New York Philharmonic’s unprecedented visit, the ensemble’s president said yesterday on the eve of departure.

The musicians said they hoped personal contacts with North Koreans could help bring the countries closer. But some also worried their performance tomorrow wouldn’t change anything, and instead be misused for propaganda in the communist country that technically remains at war with the U.S.

The philharmonic’s president and executive director, Zarin Mehta, said North Korea had met the group’s requests that the largest possible audience hear the concert. The performance will be staged in a larger hall and will be broadcast live on radio and TV.

The concert will feature Antonin Dvorak’s “Symphony No. 9” and George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” Among the encores planned is the Korean folk song “Arirang,” beloved in both the North and South.

Philharmonic musicians will also hold master classes for North Korean students and play chamber music with members of the North’s State Symphony Orchestra.

“There’s going to be major interaction with their musical community, and that’s what we wanted to do,” Mr. Mehta told the Associated Press in Beijing, where the orchestra played before its 48-hour trip to the North. “We didn’t want to go in and do a closed little concert and drive out.”

Mr. Mehta said a diplomat based in Pyongyang who briefed the orchestra told them the North was removing some of the anti-American propaganda earlier seen on the streets of the capital, Pyongyang.

The content of the posters removed was not immediately known. But such posters have portrayed iron-faced North Korean soldiers with rifles poised to strike cowering Americans or crushing Washington’s Capitol dome, the American flag in tatters.

“They are so anxious for us to come, we understand all those posters are going away,” Mr. Mehta said.

Despite that claim, North Korea’s state-controlled media kept up the vitriol yesterday, with the main Rodong Sinmun newspaper condemning “U.S. warmongers” for staging joint military exercises with South Korea that brought the peninsula “to the brink of a war.”

The Tuesday performance will begin with the orchestra playing the national anthems of both countries, and Mr. Mehta said the American and North Korean flags will stand side-by-side on stage. Mr. Mehta, who visited North Korea twice last year to organize the event, said one of his first considerations was making sure all the orchestra’s members of various nationalities, which include eight ethnic Koreans, would be allowed to participate.

North Koreans were surprised the group was so diverse, one of the discussions that Mr. Mehta said illustrates how the visit will open the eyes of the isolated nation’s 23 million people.

“Our objective is to prove that we’re not fiends and ogres and that we’re there to show what American culture and friendship and civility is all about,” he said. It was not known whether North Korean leader Kim Jong Il would attend the concert, and the Philharmonic spokesman, Eric Latzky, said the group had not directly extended an invitation to him.

The Swedish Embassy, which handles American interests in the North because the countries have no formal diplomatic relations, is working with the North Korean Foreign Ministry on the guest list for the event, he said.

America and North Korea have made progress in resolving a long-running standoff over the North’s nuclear weapons program that hit a low point when Pyongyang successfully tested a nuclear bomb in October 2006. But negotiations have stalled this year due to what Washington says is Pyongyang’s failure to give a full declaration of its atomic programs to be eventually dismantled, something it promised to do under an international agreement.

Musicians from the orchestra differed on whether their visit would bring about any thaw in relations between the two countries.

“I’ve had a lot of moral reservations based on wondering what a concert for the elite is going to do to help the people starving in the street,” a violist, Irene Breslau, 58, said.

The associate principal bass, Jon Deak, performed with the orchestra when it celebrated the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall under the direction of the legendary Leonard Bernstein.

The late Bernstein “would have wanted us to go,” Mr. Deak, 64, said. “He always wanted the arts to be in the center of world events.”

The North Koreans “will still think we’re imperialists but at least they’ll see us relating to people,” he said.