UK refuses residency to rising US soprano
NewsUnder the headline’World-class soprano denied right to settle in the UK’ the Telegraph takes up the case of Erika Baikoff, 25, a Russian-born American artist.
Selected for the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, Baikoff has sung at ENO, where she was described as ‘world class’ and taken a degree at Guildhall School of Music.
She has an agent in London and wanted to remain here, but the Home Office has ruled that she spends too much time on tour to be granted residency.
Story here.
photo: Met Opera
Austria is always a fallback…
Laughable. And that when we grant residency and more to some who spend too much time here…
She’s the wrong color to be allowed to live in the land of everything grey. (Daevid Allen)
She is an outstanding soprano!
Why on earth does the government not want the income tax revenue her worldwide income will produce for the treasury…are they totally bonkers?
The UK government would not be in receipt of her worldwide income. She would merely have to declare her worldwide income. Income tax will be levied on her earnings everywhere she appears as a non-resident of that jurisdiction but she would be able to ckaim any expenditure related to that income against her worldwide income. She will also have to continue to file a US tax return. The moot point is whether she would earn any income in the UK at all.
I’ve toured the world as a musician and pay my income tax to HMRC apart from withholding tax.
Exactly, and what’s wrong with America and then come to Britain, likely a London, when she has work? Is she Russian or American? Says she’s either Russian-American or American-Russian.
Martin What makes you think there would be no recitals, no Royal Opera House no recordings no worldwide royalties no teaching for her in the UK?
She should have “identified” as an activist Palestinian. She’d be given the keys to the city! Etc
Not surprising as the British government is run by uncultured spivs & morons!
Typical of the Civil Service and the Home Office in particular. Avoid difficult immigration issues and go after the low hanging fruit.
Pathetic.
She missed a trick. If she’d turned up on one of those dinghies she would have been welcomed and given hotel accomodation from where she could have applied for permanent residency.
Aren’t bureaucracies amazingly bizarre? And behind this no residency decision no doubt are the intellectuals, those people who produce nothing and who are never held accountable for their policies.
If she was a soccer/football player she would be welcomed. Bureaucrats are blockheads. (And don’t even ask what Brexit has done to UK touring musicians!)
What’s wrong with living in the US for our American Soprano?
It has flight connections to may places, should the need arise.
The UK should grant her a live-here-but-not-work-here visa. Get her cost-of-living spending into the British economy but don’t displace any British singers form earning their incomes.
You need an update how the music world works. Like for the last 300 years. So did Mozart displace Austrian composers. And all the Italian musicians working and living north of the Alps. They were displacing German and Austrian musicians.
How about Wagner in Riga and Paris? Chopin in Paris?
Thank God music overcomes borders. But not the borders in some people‘s minds apparently.
Did you type this on an American/Chinese/Korean smartphone? Why not on a good British smartphone?
…and Handel in London?
It is easy when you put “world class” in front of it and you neglected many unfortunate great singers who came from third world country and worked their ass off without scholarship just because of their color plus they play by the rule to get the expensive visa. When there is a pure white blonde singer who doesn’t play the rule as the other BAME singers, they play as victim. Its still a white culture washing off the rule for their own advantage.