Music to whose ears?

My colleague T. successfully managed to bully some of us to attend a concert held by her music teacher's cello students. It was all very fancy - I had a printed programme which looked very promising and the concert was held at the City Hall.

So it was a bit surprising when the first performer turned out to be a chubby kid who played a cello almost as tall as himself. What was even more surprising was how bad he was. I looked around uneasily at my two guests, S. and S., who were both glaring at me.
"You didn't say they were amateurs," S. said.
"I didn't know they were going to be this bad," I said. The older, adult performers were not much better, prompting the other S. to comment, "I didn't know there were so many older people playing the cello......and they still haven't given up."

As the evening wore on (and how it wore on) I felt that listening to these scratchy yowlings of the cello strings was an experience akin to reading Chekhov's plays. You get your hopes raised every time a new performer comes on stage. Then you realise there is no hope - the performance is terrible. It's the same when you read Chekhov - every time you start reading a play you hope that it might be better than the last, but in the end you realise it is yet another play in which yet another miserable person commits suicide.

Frankly speaking, the dismal lack of quality during the concert should have made some performers feel suicidal. One student shredded to pieces Paganini's Caprice No. 20, stumbling along difficult bars at a heartwrenchingly slow pace until he got back to the original opening melody, at which point he speeded up. Another performer sent us to hell via Bach's Prelude in G Major from Suite no. 1. Most of the students appeared to suffer from tin ear - they didn't seem to notice that they were off-key in a tremendous way. They should all be soundly beaten with a heavy metronome until they promise not to inflict themselves on the general public again.

I suppose their parents were proud of them.