Too Much for the Room?
One necessary skill for the brass player is learning to accurately gauge your volume to the situation.
For excerpts I encourage students to play in lessons at what I would think to be typical, full orchestra dynamics, which requires control of a very wide dynamic range from very soft to very loud. In an audition in a large hall for a large orchestra you in general should play the full range of orchestral dynamics, with some specific exceptions on certain excerpts. (Some works, at real orchestral dynamics but out of context, will certainly not work for an audition committee).
But in an audition in a smaller room or for a smaller orchestra you really have to think about how the dynamics hit the room. This is the most common mistake I hear when people play excerpts for brass juries (performance exams) at the end of the semester. Some get it about right and others just don’t. For those that don’t the dynamics are too big and the accents are too strong. What might be in reality just right for a large venue with a large string section suddenly does not sound soft enough out of context and may actually sound rather unpleasant, even ugly.
The same largely holds true for solos as well. The dynamic has to match the room with contrasts that work in the space. Not bland, not overdone, just right. A less proficient student won’t tend to have this problem too much, as they will tend to play everything at about the same dynamic level (in other words, they have a different problem). It is the more advanced player that has to give this real thought, they have the control to play at more or less any dynamic but must use that control to make great phrase shapes that go up to the edge but not over the edge for that space.
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