Pairs of oboes, horns, bassoons and clarinets give off an outdoors quality, one that can sound overly bright when a roof is over its head.
Thursday's program even featured a premiere: "Atthis," a half-hour piece for string quartet, double bass, clarinet, bassoon and French horn, spun off from an earlier monodrama for soprano and ensemble based on love poetry by Sappho.
Indeed, in a programme full of dance-inspired pieces, only one - Ravel's Spanish-inflected Alborada del Gracioso, its darker middle section coloured by a gorgeous bassoon solo - was thrown off to truly danceable effect.
If this was water music, it was alive with glints of sunlight and recorder off the waves, the undercurrent of a jolly bassoon, the fresh breeze of two wonderful woody oboes.
Determined to catch you off guard, it charms you with its strumming pizzicatos, gurgling bassoons and caressing strings, only to blast you out of your seat with thundering trombones and horns; it sweeps you up in a blowsy, hot-diggedy tarantella that disappears as soon as it arrives, leaving you with delicate, twitching touches of catgut and tambourine before the final brassy assault.
The sound system had an off night — a strange sonic spotlight kept falling on the bassoon — but the orchestra showed palpable involvement, finding a forward-hurtling momentum in Mahler's expansive forms.
Westlake's original material, which accounts for the majority of the score, is skillfully restrained, though there are moments when it, too, tugs at the ears, as in the sombre duet between violin and bassoon that plays when Fly's pups are sold off to the neighbors, or the demented rendition of "Jingle Bells" that accompanies the arrival of the Hoggetts' bratty, citified grandchildren.
At some point, she would like to return to life on the stage, to crawl back into the skin of her characters, like Dizzy Kane, the bassoon-playing kook with buck teeth and a pet dog, that have been regulars Off Broadway.
The word "bassoon" comes from Pleury de Basseau, a vice-admiral in the French Royal Navy who was stationed aboard a paddle frigate off the German colony of Kamerun.
In one breathtaking passage Rebekah Heller's bassoon croaked through a shimmering wash of flute, glockenspiel and gossamer strings; a moment later the ensemble kicked off what might have been a conga-line rendition of "The Rite of Spring".
