Music : Scores of Films Put Oboist Behind the Scenes : But Barbara Northcutt will take center stage with other Pacific Symphony principals Friday and Sunday at the Bowers Museum.

What do “Schindler’s List,” “Pretty Woman” and “The Last of the Mohicans” have in common?

Why, that’s Barbara Northcutt playing oboe for all three.

“I’m a studio oboist,” said Northcutt, referring to the hundreds of motion picture soundtracks to her credit. In fact, for her prominence in “Pretty Woman,” as well as “Field of Dreams,” “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and many others, she could be called principal studio oboist.

And what’s good enough for Oscar-sweeper “Schindler’s List” and, more recently, “Tommy Boy” and “Outbreak,” is certainly good enough for the Pacific Symphony, where Northcutt also serves as principal oboist, and for the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, where she’ll play chamber music Friday and Sunday.

At those concerts, Northcutt and other Pacific Symphony principals will be featured in Mozart’s Quartet for Oboe and Strings and Charles Loeffler’s Trio for Oboe, Viola and Piano. Dvorak’s Piano Trio in E Minor, “Dumky,” completes the musical portion of the evening, which includes dinner in the Topaz Cafe and admission to museum galleries.

Northcutt, in a brief phone interview during a break from a recording session for the soon-to-be-released “Apollo 13,” outlined the sorts of passages typically assigned the oboe in movie scores.

“If it’s a Jean Claude van Damme movie, probably the oboe won’t be featured so much,” Northcutt said. “For fight scenes, it would tend to sound like an angered rodent.

“The oboe’s more for romantic or sad passages,” she said. “One of the first movies I played oboe solo for was ‘Gorky Park,’ and the solo happened when the guy was ripping (the woman’s) clothes off.”

*

Ripping clothes off? So her solo sounded like an angered, lust-crazed rodent?

“No, no, ripping them in a good way,” Northcutt said. “It was a passionate love scene, not a rape scene. They were consenting. . . . I later asked my friends if they’d heard the oboe, and they said, ‘What oboe?’ ”

“Romantic or sad” might seem pretty limiting compared with the emotional range found in classical works such as the Mozart quartet (with Pacific concertmaster Sheryl Staples, violist Robert Becker and cellist Timothy Landauer) and the Loeffler trio (with Becker and pianist John Novacek).

But Northcutt’s cinematic experience may benefit her classical performances for the Pacific, where she has been principal oboist since joining in 1982.She said she’s very visually oriented, and that would surely seem to help her in the colorful two-movement work by Loeffler, an early 20th-Century American composer, which replaced the Poulenc Trio when the originally scheduled bassoonist begged off because of a scheduling conflict.

“I’d call the Loeffler work Impressionistic-Romantic,” said Northcutt, who serves on the music faculty at USC and UCLA. “The first movement is ‘The Reflecting Pond.’ The second movement is ‘The Bagpipe.’ The viola plays fifths, I play the melody, together we’re the bagpipe.

“But I tend to be most visual when I’m stuck in a pit, when we have no idea what’s going on up on stage. I’ll write in my score what I think might be going on.

“We played the opera ‘The Pearl Fishers’ by Bizet, for instance, during the Gulf War, and there’s one part that sounds like Middle Eastern wailing. I wrote, ‘Saddam Hussein, age 3, laments that his G.I. Joe has gone AWOL.’ I make up little stories.”

* Principals of the Pacific Symphony and pianist John Novacek play works by Mozart, Loeffler and Dvorak, Friday and Sunday at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. $50 package includes dinner at 6:30 p.m., gallery admission at 7:15 and concert at 8. (714) 755-5799.