UK conductor warns of post-Brexit musicians’ exodus

The Welsh conductor Owen Arwel Hughes has warned that European musicians will start leavign UK orchestras unless there is clarity about their future residency rights after Brexit.

He tells the BBC: ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen to them. Are they going to be uncertain and choose to leave the orchestra and go home, so everybody leaves the orchestra?

‘There’s the uncertainty of, ‘Do we stay, what is going to happen?’

‘Let’s say there’s an opera going on in Covent Garden and the singer goes ill, as often happens. Normally you can get somebody like that who can come from anywhere.

‘But if that freedom goes, you’ll never get anyone in time. They’ll be going through visa applications and goodness knows what.’

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