Joshua Bell, heap big famous violinist. (Alessio Bax, also fairly well-known as a pianist to anybody who's been going to Music@Menlo.) I knew this would be popular, so I arrived at Bing exceedingly early. It didn't help.
First I got waylaid and seduced into answering a lot of personal questions by a voluble Bernie Sanders supporter stationed outside, but somehow I declined telling him my full name.
Then when I got inside, I found I wasn't on the comp list. This has happened before, but I've never had the staff be as uninterested in clearing this up as they were tonight. At the very last moment - like 5 minutes after the concert was scheduled to start, and the will-call line had finally diminished, and the last-minute goodies had been given out - when the man in charge told me there were no more tickets, I said, "OK, but when SF Classical Voice doesn't publish a review, it'll be your fault," and I turned to walk out - and then he somehow produced a ticket.
It was for one of the extra seats they'd put on the risers at the back of the stage. I made that unusual seating position the focus of my review.
But baah. The Stanford arts group's long-time communications director recently left. He knew me and would never have let a reviewer get dumped to the end of the waitlist like that. I hope this isn't how the new regime chooses regularly to handle problems.
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