Romance with a Double Bass for narrator, bass, piano

for narrator, bass, pianoComposer noteRomance With a Double Bass (2018) for narrator, contrabass and piano is the result of a commission from my friend and colleague Gary Karr for his protégé, Daniel Nix. Nix gave the premiere performance on February 8 2019 at the University of Texas at Dallas with Mikhail Berestnev, piano and Mary-Margaret Pyeatt, narrator. Karr and I had collaborated earlier with Ursa: Four Seasons for Contrabass and Orchestra (1990), commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, which he premiered with the San Antonio Symphony. The work is dedicated to Gary Karr and Harmon Lewis, pianist.The Romance is based on a comic short story by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). Smichkov, a double bass player, is on his way to play at the wedding of a princess. He stops for a swim in a lake and sees a beautiful girl napping and holding a fishing line on the shore. Admiringly, he ties a bouquet to her line and swims away. When she awakens, she finds the bouque