The Treble With Travel : Despite Visa Woes, Ensemble Ricercata de Paris Will Play in Irvine Without Missing a Beat

Ah, France, Tahiti, Irvine. . . .

That’s the recent agenda for the Ensemble Ricercata de Paris, but the group almost didn’t make it to the third leg of its tour. Visa problems nearly stranded the 11-member chamber orchestra this week in Tahiti, following 10 performances at a 10-day music festival.

Imagine being stranded in Tahiti when you just must get to Irvine?

Things could be worse for the musicians--but not much worse for the Newport Beach Recital Series, sponsor of their concert Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre; the group also appears Sunday at the Bing Theater in Los Angeles.

“Every time we do a visa it’s a nightmare,” said Catherine Matovich, the series’ director of operations and wife of its artistic director, pianist Leonid Levitsky. “This is not news for any arts organization.”

The fledgling Ensemble Ricercata de Paris squeaked through customs this week as planned--but only after the intervention of a congressman and many sleepless nights for Matovich.

The Irvine program will include Bach’s Concerto in D minor, with Levitsky as piano soloist; Taneyev’s Canzona, with clarinetist Gary Gray; Shostakovich’s 10 Preludes for Violin and Chamber Ensemble, a new arrangement with the ensemble’s conductor, Alexander Brussilovsky, as violin soloist; and Chausson’s Double Concerto for Piano, Violin and String Quartet, with Levitsky and Brussilovsky as duo protagonists.

Levitsky just finished a semester as visiting professor at USC. Gray is principal clarinetist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and a faculty artist at UCLA. Brussilovsky is a guest artist at the Yehudi Menuhin School in London and director of three festivals--Suoni e colori in Tuscany, Italy, Divertimenti in Corfu, Greece, and the one in Tahiti.

Getting the orchestra from France to Tahiti to Irvine caused Matovich problems from the start, she said. The musicians had been granted visa approval from the United States, but the communique arrived in Paris too late for their passports to be stamped before they boarded the plane for Tahiti.

Without that stamp, the musicians, once in Tahiti, would not be allowed to continue to Los Angeles. Compounding the problem, there’s no active U.S. Embassy in Tahiti, and because Air France travels between Tahiti and France just once a week, flying the passports back to Paris to get their stamp was not practical.

The process had been delayed at every juncture. Matovich said that when she began the paperwork, even finding the cost of the visa application proved impossible; she has yet to find it in any INS materials.

“The application always came back marked ‘insufficient information.’ What is sufficient we have no idea. Whatever we did, whatever we sent, the [Immigration and Naturalization Service office in Laguna Niguel] said it wouldn’t work. I kept thinking, ‘Are you human?’ But it turned out the INS office located at LAX is very humane.”

Once Matovich turned to Rep. Christopher Cox (R--Newport Beach) to intervene, she said there were no problems at all. “We tried without them,” she said.

*

She said she now realizes that many of the problems stemmed from the fact that “two of the musicians were born in South Korea and Russia. Those two people were the problem--those are not favored nations.”

The 2-year-old Newport Beach Recital Series formerly operated under the umbrella of the United Methodist Church in Irvine, but California Lawyers for the Arts volunteered to help the organization incorporate as a nonprofit.

The group has penciled in six “very tentative” solo recitals and chamber concerts for 1996-97, all at the Irvine Barclay. Matovich is equally excited about a proposed summer festival at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point.

All concerts feature artistic director Leonid Levitsky in some capacity.

“We’re trying to make it not look like that,” Matovich said. “Perhaps in the future, Leonid would not play every concert. But right now, since our budget is not huge, it is to our advantage to use him. These musicians are not paid what they should be. They come because they know Leonid.”

That is certainly the case with Brussilovsky, who has played chamber music here with Levitsky on several occasions since 1994.

Said Levitsky, “We studied and made music together for many years in the Ukraine. In Moscow, we played many concerts. But then we didn’t play together for 11 years. He left Russia in 1985, and since 1986 he lives in Paris.

“That was the intermission. Now we play again.”

* The Newport Beach Recital Series presents the Ensemble Ricercata de Paris and friends performing works by Bach, Taneyev, Shostakovich and Chausson on Saturday at Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive. $8-$23. 8 p.m. (714) 854-4646. Series artist director Leonid Levitsky will give a piano master class Friday in the Fine Arts Concert Hall at UC Irvine. 1 to 3 p.m. Free. (714) 495-3760.