Wilds Can Toot Her Own Horn

While a teenager in Seattle, Margaret Wilds wanted to be a professional horn player. No one bothered to tell her that women need not apply. Everybody knows that horn players are men, right? Not quite.

Wilds, now the Spokane Symphony’s principal horn, will be the featured soloist Sunday afternoon in an all-Mozart concert at The Met. She will play the Horn Concerto No. 4.

The orchestra, led by music director Fabio Mechetti, will open the concert with the Serenade in D (K. 203) and conclude with the Symphony No. 35, nicknamed the “Haffner” Symphony. The concert will be repeated Tuesday evening.

“The first note I played for a horn teacher when I was 14 was for Anna Cloud,” Wilds says. “And she was my teacher until I left for college. She was a member of the Seattle Symphony for more than 30 years. The orchestra had two and even three female horn players when I was growing up. Nobody in Seattle would have known there was anything unusual about a woman playing horn.”

The instrument Wilds plays is sometimes called “the French horn,” but professionals who play it prefer simply “the horn” since there’s nothing particularly French about it.

“I played the piano for seven years and had taken ballet and dinked around in the corners of music for a while,” Wilds recalls. “Then I saw what a great time my brother was having playing the trumpet in the high school band, so I wanted to join the orchestra and play horn.”

Wilds grew up in a musical home. Her father, who died when Wilds was only 13, had been a trombonist in early jazz bands, recording with Jack Teagarden, before turning to a career in psychology. Her mother was a cellist who gave up playing after college. Wilds’ brother is now a freelance musician in Southern California.

The real turning point for Wilds came when she played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the Seattle Youth Symphony. “That experience was so incredible for me that I just dropped other career plans. Music became too beguiling for me to do anything else.”

At Indiana University, Wilds studied with Robert Ellsworth and Philip Farkas, longtime principal horn of the Chicago Symphony. Upon returning to Seattle for graduate study, she worked with the University of Washington’s David Kappy.

Wilds has been associated with the Spokane Symphony since the 1985-86 season, when she joined the group as interim principal horn. She returned in that position in 1988 and was made principal horn in 1989. She spent two seasons with the San Diego Symphony, and she has performed with Seattle’s Musicians Emeritus Orchestra, the Northwest Chamber Orchestra and the Utah Symphony.

In addition to her career as a soloist and orchestral player, Wilds has achieved wide recognition for her work in chamber music. As a member of the Quintessential Brass Ensemble, she won both the Fischoff and the Coleman Chamber Music Competitions. She was a member of the Emerald City Brass Quintet during its nine-year history and has performed in Spokane with Zephyr, the Clarion Brass Choir and other chamber groups.

Wilds currently teaches horn at Whitworth College.

The work Wilds will play Sunday is one of four concertos Mozart composed for horn. “I don’t want to say it’s hard,” Wilds says. “It’s very hard. This concerto is frequently used in auditions because the auditioners can tell a lot about your playing from just the first few minutes - from the richness of those held notes to the agility required only seconds later.

“But more than the difficulties, it has all the great qualities of Mozart, the seeming simplicity, the economy of means, the luscious, romantic feeling of the slow movement and the rollicking last movement - funny and delightful to hear. It’s one of the very greatest pieces for the horn.”

As is customary at the symphony’s Met performances, Mechetti will provide informal spoken program notes before each work.

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MEMO: Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. CONCERT The Spokane Symphony will perform at The Met on Sunday at 3 p.m. and on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $9, $14, $16 and $19.50, available at the symphony ticket office (624-1200), G&B Select-a-Seat outlets or call (800) 325-SEAT.

2. FOOD DONATIONS TO BENEFIT FOOD BANK The Spokane Symphony will set up barrels to collect food for the Spokane Food Bank at its concerts on Sunday and Tuesday at The Met. The food bank serves nearly 13,000 people each month and the winter months are particularly busy. The most needed items are chili, stew, tuna, soup, peanut butter, rice, canned fruits and vegetables, macaroni and cheese, and powdered milk. Only non-perishable foods can be distributed through the food bank. Monetary donations will also be accepted. The food bank says it can distribute $10 worth of food for ever $1 donated.