A Few Audition Tips

Audition observations from a committee member.

Recently I had the pleasure of being on an audition committee for the Arizona Opera. It has been a while since I have served on an audition committee, and this experience reminded me of some basic tips I learned that are worth sharing to anyone out there on the audition circuit.

The three most important audition elements are tone, intonation and rhythm .

In the preliminary round, most committees are not looking for a winner right away. They are looking for candidates to pass on to the next round to listen to again in more detail – in effect, separating the wheat from the chaff.

These three elements – tone, intonation and rhythm – are the basic criteria for that task. An outstanding weakness in any of these areas can be the grounds for dismissal.

Notice that in this criteria I do not mention accuracy.

This is a given – an absolute. If you want to have any reasonable expectations of doing well at auditions, you absolutely cannot crack notes. While horn players on a committee might have a bit of empathy, other musicians do not.

A few other observations:

• Empty condensation before entering the audition room. Making a committee wait for you to empty slides when you first sit down does not make a good impression. This is one of my personal pet peeves.
• If the committee asks for an excerpt to be repeated, think carefully about why you were asked to do it again. Along this line of thought, if you absolutely feel that you could play something significantly better if given a second chance, ask the audition prompter if you can play it again.Be mindful that this is a risk and it can be like a double-edged sword. If you do indeed perform it better the second time, the risk pays off. If you do not perform it significantly better, you may leave the committee a bit perplexed and puzzled.
• At a fully screened audition, wear comfortable clothes.For female players, I would suggest wearing flat-soled shoes as elevated heels can be heard from behind the screen as they click on the floor. This aside, it seems more logical (to my male mind anyway) that flat heels would be infinitely more comfortable than high heels.
• In the first movement expositions of Mozart concertos number 2 and 4, pay special attention to the fast scale passages. At the recent audition, many candidates rushed these under pressure – especially the rests in-between each scale passage.Also, pay close attention to any adjacent octave-related notes. In an ambient room especially, octaves that do not line up are very much noticed. These two concerti have a few octave spots in each exposition that if not dead-on in tune, stick out like a sore thumb.