Through his attorney, Petkov provided Snyder with a copy of a petition she herself had signed on behalf of the ISO a year earlier, indicating to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that he had a Class 01 visa (not H-1B) based on his extraordinary artistic ability. No charges were filed; in fact, Petkov was subsequently hired as personnel manager with the Peoria Symphony Orchestra, where executive director Judy Furniss sounds happy to have him. “In hiring Kamen, one determining factor was how well-liked and respected he is by musicians throughout Illinois,” Furniss wrote in an e-mail to Illinois Times. “The response from our players to the hiring of Kamen . . . has been overwhelmingly positive.”

For the ISO musicians, who had tolerated Deal’s imperious attitude for almost a decade, the loss of the popular Petkov was “the drop of water that made the cup overflow.” Inspired by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra’s no-confidence vote in conductor Gerard Schwarz (the result was 61- 8, and he is stepping down from the job in 2011) and having gotten a positive response to the idea in a telephone poll of contracted musicians, a small group of longtime ISO players retained a Bloomington CPA to conduct a noconfidence vote. That CPA, Mary Ann Webb, says she mailed two types of ballots — plain white ballots to the 62 contracted musicians, and orange ballots to 37 regular subs. Her office received 49 white ballots and 23 orange, all but two marked to express no confidence in Deal. ISO board president John Wohlwend says the anonymous vote means nothing to him. “That committee of musicians is absolutely out of order,” he says. “I’m not ever going to consider that an official vote.” He sent a four-man subcommittee (three board members plus an attorney) to meet with the players who had instigated the vote. The musicians arrived armed with a long list of specific examples of Deal’s ineptitude plus a request to perform regular evaluations of her skill (a common practice among orchestras worldwide).

Wohlwend says that neither the list of examples nor the request for evaluation was passed on to him. “To me, that’s not a board of directors issue,” he says.

Some people describe the executive committee as impenetrable. Marion van der Loo, the chorus conductor fired in 2006, made numerous futile requests to meet with the small group; Rossi also asked to meet with the committee, succeeding only after he had submitted his resignation. Members of the lower advisory board have the same complaint.

One current board member, who asked not to be named, calls the ISO board “the silliest board I’ve ever been on,” and compares it to a cheerleading group. “I’ve never been on a board where we couldn’t vote on anything and couldn’t know anything,” the advisor says. Richard McDaniel, who sang in the ISO chorus for 25 years and served 10 years on the advisory board, resigned that position earlier this year because of his discomfort with the top committee’s decisions. “There was significant staff turnover in the last couple of years, and we were never really given solid reasons for it,” he says. He believes the orchestra musicians’ recent announcement of their intent to unionize is due to the opacity of the board’s top tier. “My biggest concern is that the leadership has been concentrated in a smaller and smaller group,” McDaniel says. “John Wohlwend and Karen Deal are seemingly running the group. There’s no protocol for conflict resolution within the organization.”

Karen Barber, the former ISO Guild president who resigned from the board a year ago, has held season tickets for so many years she remembers when they cost $10. She still attends performances, still houses musicians in her home, still loves the Illinois Symphony Orchestra.

In an e-mail last summer, she tried to alert the board to problems underlying the spate of resignations. “This is not acceptable, and the fact that we have sat around for a month and act like we just need to replace some counter workers at a retail outlet is an insult to the professionalism of our staff,” she wrote. In a separate e-mail, Barber told Wohlwend that she was declining an appointment to the ISO advisory board, “simply because I have no faith that this organization will deal with its problems.”

Wohlwend declined to comment. ”I’m a business person. I scrutinize the financials. I’m very analytical and I’m proud of that,” he says. “I look to where we’re going rather than where we’ve been.”

Contact Dusty Rhodes at [email protected].