I had a wonderful conversation with SLSO bassoonist Felicia
Foland Thursday morning. Felicia will be the
"Meet the Musician" subject for the September Playbill.
She spoke to me from her country home, somewhere off a dirt road south of Hermann, MO,
in a renovated log cabin that had been part of a German settlement in the 1860s. Felicia has been with the SLSO for 20 years--she really couldn't remember if
she started in 1990 or '91. She grew up in Kirkwood and was a member of the Saint Louis Symphony Youth Orchestra. She's
actually the first YO alum to have
joined the SLSO, and was soon
followed by Becky Boyer Hall, Kristin Ahlstrom, Mark Sparks, and more recently, Sarah Hogan and Erin Schreiber.
We got to talking about the
fact that she's been playing for so many years, and she told me that it is an
activity that has yet to grow old. "I really love playing the bassoon," she said. "It feels good. It's
physical. Sometimes I wonder, 'Could I do without this?' And for now the answer is 'No.' I'm really engaged....
"People will say, 'But aren't you doing the same things every year?' But whenever Beethoven's
Fifth is in front of me, I don't think I've ever played it before. Only the notation is the
same. Everything else is different. It's a living, breathing art. The more you
play it, the more options open up.
It only becomes a broader field, not more narrow."
