The San Diego Symphony’s Music Director and Conductor Rafael Payare took up the notoriously difficult French horn at the age of 13. During an hour-long Zoom interview while he was in Montreal, I asked how he had managed to become a soloist less than six months later! “I have to admit it was a little bit fast,” he said. Not the haughty egotistical answer I might have gotten from film conductor-stereotypes. His local youth orchestra, a part of Venezuela’s extensive El Sistema program, needed horns, so he joined a few weeks after first picking one up. “For a couple of classes, I could o...