A sudden death, a trapped bassoon, and the return of an iconic instrument to the Philadelphia Orchestra

Trapped inside a shuttered musical instrument repair shop in a New York City suburb sits Mark Gigliotti’s livelihood: his prized bassoon, locked up, unattended, and likely pulled apart into pieces.

Worse, the Philadelphia Orchestra player has no idea when he’ll once again see his instrument — a 1931 German bassoon with an enviable Philadelphia pedigree, owned and played by him for half a century.

Calls have been made, a lawyer hired, and months into the strange episode, no resolution is in sight.

The orchestra’s coprincipal bassoonist had expected to be separated from his own instrument for two or three weeks. He needed surgery on his right hand for arthritis and, after scheduling the procedure for September, figured it was also a good time for his instrument to undergo routine maintenance.

He dropped off the bassoon at Nicholas Evans’ shop in Yonkers in November, as he had done many times before in the last 10 or 15 years. About a week later he thought of something he wanted to tell Evans, so he called the shop.

He didn’t hear back, so he called again. Then again.

“I must have called 20 times.”

A week later, someone from Yonkers city government called with an explanation for the silence: The highly regarded repairman was dead.

“Nick went to bed and never woke up,” said Gigliotti.

“It came as a complete shock. We were very close to Nick. So just the fact that he died was very difficult. And then the situation with the bassoon kind of came into the picture and we started to realize the ramifications of that.”

The ramifications were numerous. Evans had no immediate family, says Gigliotti, and left no will, and so Gigliotti expected it would be some time before the estate would be sorted out and the instruments in the shop returned to their owners.

In the meantime, Gigliotti’s hand was better and he was scheduled to return to work for the orchestra’s New Year’s Eve concert, and had no instrument. And even if he could find another bassoon, it might not be an easy fit.

“The thing with these vintage instruments is that every one is different from another, and varying to big degrees in some cases,” Gigliotti says. “It’s very hard to jump from one instrument to another.”

But word of his tough spot started to get around, and a friend suggested contacting Peter Schoenbach, a music administrator, linguist, bassoonist, former dean at the Curtis Institute, and son of legendary Philadelphia Orchestra bassoonist Sol Schoenbach.

Peter Schoenbach had already heard of Gigliotti’s predicament, so when Gigliotti called, he immediately wanted to help by loaning one of his two bassoons — his father’s.

Schoenbach had to first check with his insurance company about adding a rider, but after the expense was determined, he told Gigliotti: “It’ll cost you $350, but the instrument is yours.”

The historical resonances of the loan are both musical and personal, and in an orchestra as dynastic as this one — with musicians often following their wives, husbands, siblings, and other relatives into membership — one tends to blur into the other.

Schoenbach’s and Gigliotti’s fathers once played side by side in the orchestra — Sol Schoenbach was principal bassoonist from 1937 to 1957, and Anthony Gigliotti principal clarinetist from 1949 to 1996.

Both men were members of the illustrious Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet, which actively performed and recorded in the 1950s and ’60s. And the two families were close from the days when they lived near each other in North Philadelphia’s Logan neighborhood in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Then there’s the story of how Mark Gigliotti came to play the bassoon in the first place. He started as a pianist, then at age 10 took up the clarinet — first studying with his father, then his grandfather — and recalls hearing Sol Schoenbach playing chamber music.

“I was fascinated by it. I mean, he was such a beautiful player. His sound, no one had that sound,” Gigliotti said.

While the orchestra was in residence in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., one summer, “we were sitting there one night looking out at Lake George having this conversation,” recalled Gigliotti in a recent talk with Peter Schoenbach. “I don’t know how we got onto it, but I was complaining about the clarinet and my grandfather yelling at me, and your dad said, ‘Why don’t you let me teach him the bassoon?’”

Gigliotti studied with Schoenbach for a year before switching to other teachers — or, rather, after being switched.

“I think he got a little tired of the beginner stuff,” Gigliotti said.

Musically, Gigliotti’s and Schoenbach’s bassoons are similar. They were both made by Wiesbaden-based bassoon maker Heckel, which traces its beginnings to 1831 and is still producing instruments. Both were made in the 1930s. The era is significant, Gigliotti said.

“The instruments from that time, from 1930 to let’s say 1950, we call them the Stradivarius of bassoons, and they’re amazing instruments.”

After Gigliotti took possession of Schoenbach’s bassoon, “I put it together, and it was like, wow. I mean, it has an incredible sound.”

When Giglotti listens to recordings of Schoenbach playing the instrument, he says it is “the sound that I always wanted to have.”

Says Schoenbach: “Me, too.”

“It’s very individual,” Schoenbach explains. “It’s like your voice or your fingerprint. Everybody, no matter if they play the same instrument, the same reed, it doesn’t sound exactly the same.”

Schoenbach has yet to hear Gigliotti playing his father’s bassoon in the orchestra.

Gigliotti will next play the instrument in this week’s performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 (the third bassoon part) — and in concerts for an undetermined period of time. The New Year’s Eve and Mahler concerts are the first time the instrument has been heard in the Philadelphia Orchestra in nearly 70 years.

The Sol Schoenbach sound is familiar to many, even if they don’t know it, since he was principal bassoonist during much of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s golden age of recording. It was Schoenbach who played the famously high, eerie opening bassoon solo in the Rite of Spring segment of Fantasia — a solo he played 45 times before conductor Leopold Stokowski would give his approval.

The instrument is also known as one of the orchestra’s more sonorous character actors, representing the cantankerous grandfather in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and snoring soldiers in Smetana’s Má vlast. Mozart used the bassoon for evoking urgency, Brahms for sincerity, Rimsky-Korsakov for mystery. To Berlioz, only the bassoon could convey the proper stealth and spook of an opium-fueled march to the scaffold.

Sol Schoenbach died in 1999 at age 83 after making his mark not just as a musician, but also as the longtime director of the Settlement Music School and a civic leader.

The recent episode — Evans’ death, the ongoing limbo state of Gigliotti’s instrument — is obviously sorrowful and frustrating, but it has also brought unexpected joys.

“It’s what we call serendipity, this thing, right?” Schoenbach said. “All of these things falling into place, it’s like it was fated that somehow if this were to take place, that would be the outcome.”

”And in a way, your dad is alive again,” said Gigliotti to Schoenbach.

“Yeah, absolutely,” said Schoenbach of his father’s presence once more wafting through the orchestra. “Between us, we brought him back.”

Mahler’s “Symphony No. 9,” Jan. 9 and 11, Marian Anderson Hall, 300 S. Broad St., Phila. philorch.ensembleartsphilly.org, 215-893-1999.