(classical orchestral music) - [Fei Xie] I've been the principal bassoon of the Minnesota Orchestra since 2017 and this marked my third season with the orchestra.

Tonight I will be playing the Mozart Bassoon Concerto for our audience.

I grew up in China.

I was surrounded by traditional Chinese music.

My parents were Peking Opera instrumentalists.

My uncle was a composer, and my aunt is also a erhu player, playing the Peking Opera.

So that's kind of my first interaction with music was Peking Opera.

Studying bassoon was kind of grim.

I started taking piano lessons when I was four, so when I was about twelve years old, my parents took me to Beijing to take a couple lessons from a piano teacher who was teaching a school at the time.

She thinks the level I'm at is not good enough to get into the school.

She suggested that I could apply for wind department.

We decided to give that a shot, so my parents, my uncle, and I went to see the bassoon professor, and she showed me the instrument.

That's when I was thinking Oh, what is this?

It's a long stick of woods and put them together and then she started playing and immediately I was drawn to the sound of the instrument.

I said to her, "I want to learn this if you take me."

I had to leave home, so I studied in a dorm with about seven other kids, living on my own.

We have people, we have, the school was kind of taking care of us and my uncle lives in the city, but all the kids are on our own and would take lessons and practice and yeah, just like that.

(orchestral music) What I love most about bassoon is the mellow and tender sound that it can provide.

It can bring out and it's really a singing tenor voice.

You can do so much with it.

(orchestral music) So bassoon has about three and a half octaves in terms of the range of the notes.

Each octave has their own character.

You know, the low register has this dark and deep, very covered sound, and the tenor register just really sing out.

A lot of opera composers used that to pair with tenors, and the high registers has become a favorite of the contemporary composers.

Aside from practicing, learning music, we have to do the woodwork, making our own reeds.

It's a really fine craftsmanship.

It's a tiny piece of cane.

It's called a roundodonex.

It's a tube cane and then we split into little parts and gouge the inside shape, the outside, and form in a way, and then you fold into half, cut it open.

That becomes a double reed.

Being an orchestral musician, you don't get to play concertos so much, so you have to start working out different reeds and different sound projections and playing standing up, all these little things that you normally do day to day playing orchestra.

Mozart wrote the Bassoon Concerto when he was 18 years old.

We have to remember that he composed his first piece of music when he was five and first symphony when he was eight years old.

So at age of 18 he's a well-versed composer already.

You can hear from the piece that Mozart really captured the capability and the character of the solo instrument, even though this is his first woodwind concerto.

(bassoon music) So he uses the rapid tonguings, rapid articulations, and wide leap jumps in between octaves and string of trills, all these techniques, to show the virtuosity of the instrument.

And in the middle movement, he composed a aria-like movement that's really one of my favorite.

He used a lot of the tenor register of the instrument and that brings out the tender and sweetness of the bassoon.

(bassoon music) Any Mozart fan knows that he's a master of opera composer, and the second movement in this piece he used the motif in "The Marriage of Figaro."

It was an aria sung by the countess.

In honor to that, in the second movement, I wrote a little cadenza and it has a little bit of quote from the opera back into the concerto.

So it should be interesting.

(bassoon music) It's long been my dream to play the concerto with this orchestra and Osmo and finally it has become the reality and I'm really looking forward to it.