Musical Isolationism

David Patrick Stearns had an interesting piece in this past Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer (one of the few American dailies that still employs not one, but two full-time reporters covering the classical beat,) in which he points out a puzzling new development in our industry. Stearns writes: "With a weak dollar, strong euro, U.S. visas requiring much paperwork, and risk-wary American presenters, the once-global community of classical musicians has become fragmented in ways that beloved, familiar talents on one side of the ocean are unknown on the other."

Now, to some degree, America and Europe have always had differing views of various composers and performers, and what's trendy and popular in New York or Boston might be seen as unimportant or unmusical in Berlin and Vienna. But the point Stearns is making is that the musical universes of Europe and America increasingly seem to be operating on parallel tracks separated by a brick wall. We in the States simply don't get to hear a lot of the top European talent that's out there these days, because getting permission for them to enter our country has become such a hassle.

Case in point: the Finnish a cappella group, Rajaton, with whom we performed last weekend's pops shows, almost didn't make it to Minneapolis, despite months of careful preparations by both their people and ours. They had a valid American work visa that was supposed to cover them for several US performances over the course of a calendar year, as did conductor Jaakko Kuusisto, and since none of them were carrying instruments, they wouldn't even need to worry about all the hassles most musicians have to go through every time we try to get on an airplane.

But the day before we were scheduled to have two rehearsals for the Rajaton show, word filtered through Orchestra Hall that conductor and band were stuck in Edmonton, Alberta, where they'd just done the same show we were about to do, and were being denied entry to the US pending a closer examination of their paperwork. Our people, who have been through this garbage more times than they probably care to remember, got on the line to whatever government entities you call in these situations, and figured out that the hang-up seemed to be that our guests were European citizens trying to enter the US through Canada. Apparently, this sends up all sorts of red flags over at Homeland Security, I suppose on the general assumption that a terrorist wanting to sneak into the US might figure he had a better shot if he could come across the border from a country friendly to America. (If, in fact, there are any of those left.)

The upshot of the delay was that we had to cancel one of our two rehearsals when it became clear that there would be no one present to lead us or sing with us. And by the time the second rehearsal rolled around, only conductor Kuusisto had managed to make it past the border patrol. So we rehearsed the whole show without our soloists (some of us did, ahem, try to be helpful by singing key passages of our favorite Queen songs as we played,) and crossed our fingers. And eventually, late Thursday evening, Rajaton managed to get on a plane bound for MSP, courtesy of an artful, complicated, and completely ridiculous bit of paper-shuffling that involved our management, their visa, and for reasons that will never really be clear to me, the Charlotte Symphony.

The show went off without a hitch, thanks mainly to Kuusisto's perfectly prepared and meticulously annotated orchestra parts. But I can't helping thinking that, were I a European performer going through what our guests had just gone through, I'd think seriously about whether I wanted to accept any future offers to perform in America. And that's bad news for all of us.