Now playing: Meet the Mozarts
The music of the Spokane Symphony’s concerts at The Met on Sunday and Tuesday will sound just like home to Lynne Feller-Marshall.
The program, featuring Feller-Marshall, the symphony’s principal bassoonist, is made of up of works by the Mozarts, father and son.
“When I was growing up,” she says, “nearly every night I would go to bed hearing Mozart being played on my dad’s stereo downstairs. He was an engineer and quite the audiophile, and he just loved Mozart. He would have loved this concert.”
She will be featured as soloist in W.A. Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto in a program that also includes the younger Mozart’s “Haffner” symphony along with Leopold Mozart’s “Peasant Wedding” and “Hunting Symphony.” Music director Eckart Preu will conduct.
Feller-Marshall grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and became interested in the bassoon as a result of watching televised performances of the Boston Pops with her grandparents.
“I was fascinated by that instrument that looked like it had a chimney and whose sound my grandfather loved,” she says.
When she picked the bassoon as her instrument to play in the school band, Feller-Marshall says, “I had to endure the usual teasing – ‘you sound like a cow.’ Unfortunately, every beginning bassoonist sounds like a cow, or worse. But I got better.”
She received her undergraduate degree at the State University of New York–Potsdam and later studied at the Juilliard School with Stephen Maxym, longtime principal bassoon in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and Frank Morelli, a founding member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
She has both a master’s degree and doctorate from Juilliard.
Feller-Marshall, then just plain Lynne Feller, began flying to Spokane from New York in 1992 to perform with the Spokane Symphony whenever concerts required three bassoons.
She was appointed principal bassoon in 1994, moved to Spokane, and met and married John Marshall, who joined the orchestra that year as principal cellist. The couple have two children, ages 4 and 7.
“I first played Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto when I was in high school, but only the last movement,” Feller-Marshall recalls. “I didn’t get to perform the whole concerto until my senior year at Potsdam.”
The earliest of Mozart’s surviving concertos for wind instruments, the Bassoon Concerto’s origins remain a mystery. It may or may not have been one of the three bassoon concertos written by the 18-year-old Mozart for a certain Baron von Duernitz.
“But for whom or what Mozart wrote it,” Feller-Marshall says, “it’s a wonderful piece. And Mozart must have liked it, too, since he borrowed the opening of the slow movement in a couple of later works.”
The other pieces on Sunday’s program by the famous, younger Mozart include a short contredanse the composer called “The Battle,” along with the well-known “Haffner” symphony.
His father, Leopold, will be represented by two of his humorous, programmatic works, a symphony describing a hunt and another depicting a country wedding.
“I think it will be interesting for our audience to hear music by a very great composer next to music by one who we don’t think is maybe quite so great,” Preu said in an interview earlier this season. “It may make us think, ‘Just what makes this music great, and that music less than great?’ ”
As is usual with symphony performances at The Met, Preu will introduce each work on the program with verbal commentary and musical illustrations played by the orchestra.