BASSOON WAS ALWAYS MUSIC TO SYMPHONY PLAYER’S EARS

Bassoonist Dennis Michel first heard the sometimes squawky, sometimes deeply mellifluous tones of his instrument when he was a second-grader, living on a 480-acre wheat farm in northern Idaho.

It was one of Leonard Bernstein’s young people’s concerts on television and, for young Michel (he pronounces it like Michael), love at first hearing. He was entranced, too, by the fact that Bernstein’s bassoonist in the Haydn Sinfonia Concertante was a teen-ager.

From that moment, Michel knew that some day he was going to play the bassoon. This week, as principal bassoon with the San Diego Symphony, he is playing as soloist Carl Maria von Weber’s Concerto in F Major for Bassoon. The piece shows off the instrument’s range, and is well-known for its humorous qualities and lyrical nature.

As a would-be child musician, Michel’s passion for the bassoon was initially thwarted. When his family moved to Spokane, Wash., there were no bassoons in his elementary school band. He played clarinet, but kept his dream. “I used to have Dad check out bassoon records from the library. I was a very weird kid,” Michel said.

In junior high school, he talked the band director into buying the school’s first bassoon. Michel bugged the director almost daily, asking if the instrument had arrived, and when it did, he beat the director to the music store to pick it up.

“I was thrilled to get the instrument,” he said, although today, at a distance of 20 years, he remembers it as “a horrible plastic instrument.” But it helped move Michel into a position with the local youth symphony that put him on the road to becoming a professional symphonic musician.

Michel and his new wife, Peggy, an oboe player, had a less than ideal welcome to San Diego when they arrived here from Kansas four years ago. Between teaching, playing with the Wichita Symphony, chamber music concerts and recitals, the Michels had been running all the time, but were financially secure.

When they arrived here, after he won the job of principal bassoon with the San Diego Symphony, they didn’t know that the orchestra was on the brink of financial disaster. When he went to the symphony offices to pick up his first paycheck in September, 1981, Michel was told that the symphony was “having problems.” There was to be no paycheck.

“We had just quit four jobs in Kansas,” he said. “Things were kind of lean for a while, but that was four years ago.”

Four years and one new Symphony Hall later, Michel is glad he moved. Michel says he misses playing chamber works, but with a 45-week symphony season in San Diego he stays “pretty busy.”

The stereotype for bassoon players, he said, is that “they are jovial and spend a lot of time doing something else besides playing the bassoon. They do things like work in math or computers or farm,” he said. At 32, Michel fits the jovial category, being able to joke, for example, about the fact that he began going bald while still in high school.

But as for hobbies, he said, “I really don’t have any; I just love to play the bassoon.”