The double bass 18-year-old Elizabeth Dorman plays dwarfs her 5’3” frame by more than a foot, a fact that draws frequent comments that are the source of some irritation—even if Dorman does on occasion make that observation herself. “Everybody says that!” she exclaims while standing in the lobby of Davies Symphony Hall, home to the San Francisco Symphony and a place where Dorman splits her time between playing double bass and piano in the organization’s youth orchestra. “I think the bass is taller than most people,” she adds.

She makes a good point.

In fact, Dorman makes lots of good points.

Level-headed, insightful, and infinitely cheerful, the teen string player appears to have an extraordinarily bright future ahead of her, but Dorman isn’t really thinking about that for the moment. “I’m not sure what I want to do. I love the instrument,” she says. “Right now I’m just going to try to study as much as I can and leave those kinds of decisions for grad school.”

Perhaps it’s easy to be so even-keeled when success has been more like a constant friend than an elusive stranger. Four years ago, Dorman scored a sweet deal when she tried out for the prestigious SFS Youth Orchestra. Not only did the teenager pass the audition, she won the coveted principal bassist seat.

In recent years, she’s also nabbed honors at the Ross McKee Competition, Young Artists Beethoven Competition, and, most recently, the 2005 San Francisco Youth Orchestra Competition. Music critic Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle this summer praised Dorman for her deliver of Bartók’s Third Concerto, noting that the performance was “as striking for its restraint as its technical assurance.” He also called her “unnervingly precocious.”

He got that right.

Yet her career as a double bassist almost didn’t happen. At age 12, Dorman—who’d been playing violin for eight years—developed a wanderlust for the cello. That dream proved short-lived. Her middle-school orchestra teacher informed the ingénue there were just too many cellos already in the school’s ensemble.

“So he stuck me out in the hallway with a scale book [and a bass],” Dorman says, “and I’ve been playing ever since.”