The performance was outstanding, but I couldn't keep from thinking how unnatural all this was — a little creepy even in the empty hall. Plus, Berio was on the case when he wrote the score in the Bay Area in 1968 as a reaction to all the political turmoil surrounding him. In the third movement, which includes in the collage of spoken text, there is this uncanny excerpt from Samuel Beckett's "The Unnamable": "That's the show waiting for the show … and the spectators, where are they, you didn't notice, in the anguish of waiting, never noticed you were waiting alone." Near the movement's end, we hear that "it's quite hopeless. ... But it can't go on."