‘Am I big enough yet?” Gabrielle Pho would ask her mother every year. At 3 or 4, she wasn’t. Aged 9, though, the Virginia-born Pho was finally an appropriate size to start French horn lessons.
“I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know what I was going to play,” says Pho, now principal horn with Auckland Philharmonia. “My mother played as a teenager to a good standard, and she had a pretty decent instrument that she’d kept. I don’t know if it’s because it looks cool and shiny or because of the sound it makes, but I never even considered playing anything else.”
Pho didn’t get lessons from her mum, though: “She never felt she was qualified to teach me.” Like numerous other kids in the United States, she came up through wind bands. That all stopped when she encountered an orchestra.
“Any idea of playing in a band left me,” she says. “In a band, a lot of the time you’re just doubling the saxophone or playing offbeats in all the marches with euphonium. Then you get into orchestra and suddenly the trumpet takes a back seat, the saxophones are gone, the euphoniums are gone and you have your own individual horn part.”
Pho gets a rare opportunity during the orchestra’s July 10 Nightscapes concert to step out of her section and join three colleagues at the front of the stage for Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Four Winds. It’s almost certainly not by Mozart at all – books have been written about the Concertante’s dubious provenance – but it is elegant and melodic, and the interplay between oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn is delightful. “It feels a lot like chamber music,” says Pho. “There are sections where the orchestra is thinly scored and it’s like you’re playing a wind quintet or something like that.”
It’s the first time Pho has performed the work. That’s true of a lot of the orchestral repertoire she plays. Still in her mid-20s and just a couple of years out of New York’s Juilliard School, Pho is not only the leader of the horn section, she’s the youngest member. One of her team joined Auckland Phil the year after Pho was born.
“There’s a significant gap in experience,” she says, “so I don’t see my leadership role in the traditional way. I think it’s my job to collect the opinions and knowledge of the section and then choose a path where we can be unified. If I felt I needed to be in charge or tell them what to think, that wouldn’t work for me. I might have listened to a piece 100 times but they’ve played it 100 times, and there’s no substitute for that.”
Auckland Philharmonia, Nightscapes: Auckland Town Hall, July 10, 7.30pm.
