OperaChic has basked in the glow of Grigory Sokolov's genius, and you haven't.
The New York Times, for once, got it:
That Mr. Sokolov, whose talent is beyond dispute, disproves this notion
should remind us not only of our persistent parochialism but also of
our delusions about technology. The Web, on which he can be found on
YouTube, giving astonishing performances, clearly doesn’t substitute
for hearing him live. Neither do discs, which, as a perfectionist, he
stopped issuing in 1995 (this partly explains his American situation),
although years ago Mr. Sokolov’s recordings sent me hunting for a
chance to hear him in person. On one of those discs he played Chopin’s
24 Preludes with great sensitivity. He played them again the other
night. It was, like all concerts likely to stay in the mind forever,
nothing that could ever be captured digitally.
Now, by0tching about a performance one witnesses by playing a video
through one's cr4ppy computer speakers via shaky blurry YouTube is one
of America's greatest agoraphobic pastimes (actually getting on the
subway or catching a cab or driving somewhere to personally appear at a
concert hall / opera haus is a bit of a revolutionary concept for many
Rapidshare junkies) there are times when YouTube just isn't enough.
Not to mention that, in Sokolov's case, if you live in the UK you won't get to hear him play live in the future, at least for a while, because the maestro has obviously had to take enough sh^t under Soviet rule to actually be willing, at his age, to go back to submitting himself to intrusive police controls (and the Westerners among us can't really blame him for that). The obvious solution here, as pointed out by Jess, would be to create a special path or visa waiver program for sports and entertainment visitors who travel to a country for a very limited period, usually days, to do their thang and then leave. Unless one seriously thinks that elderly professional violinists from the former USSR and soccer players from South America are actually a risk and they could come to a country not for a concert or a game but to blow themselves up on a bus, which, when you think about it, is a possibility that Homeland Security would probably not discard.
Another solution would, of course, be less parochial when booking artists -- this is true for American insititutions and European ones as well (it's probably telling that we heard Sokolov play Milan's Auditorium, not at la Scala).