concert review: double-bass recital

If you're as curious a cat as I am, you might go to a double-bass recital. Yes, I reviewed it. Two slightly eccentric 19th-century Italian composers, and three increasingly avant-garde modern Americans who went into it with their eyes fully open to their awful situation, wrote chamber music pieces featuring a solo double bass, and that's what I heard, amid stucco acoustics suitable for transmitting the reticent sound of a double bass around if for nothing else. The last piece was one of those absolute trash-cans of pure noise that makes you wonder, "When was it that composers stopped writing, you know, music?" And its perpetrator is actually a composition professor at UC Berkeley! What do they teach them in those schools?

Because you read this blog, you will of course want to know more about those "unintentionally amusing typos" in the program book. Very well, the highlights:

• Robert Schumann. Franz Schubert. Not the same guy. One of them wrote Schumann's Op. 102, the other didn't.
• Stravinsky did not compose The Right of Spring. Close, but no cigar.
• Too many parallel "l"s in parallelled.
• The violin virtuoso was Niccolo Paganini, not Pagonini. You got it right two sentences later!
• eludes for alludes. That was just painful.

It was clumsily written, too.