Orchestral Excerpts from one of My Audition Tapes

Talking to one of my former students at AMEA last weekend she mentioned an excerpt from a tape I played for her in a lesson as being particularly memorable and impressive, that it really put out the fact that I was a player.

The excerpt is one that is in a sense very well known but students (and pros) almost never work on it unless they have to play it, the screaming, crazy passage in the Janacek Sinfonietta. This was one of two excerpts that I put on the audition tape (yes, a cassette tape) that I sent to ASU in very early 2001 as a part of my application for the position I hold here now (I also put on recent live solo and brass and woodwind quintet performances). At that time I had been out of the Nashville Symphony for two and a half years, teaching at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam. Also, the previous two summers, I had served as Principal horn for most of the summer in the Brevard Music Center Orchestra.

The Janacek was recorded the first summer I was in Brevard, on the final concert of the summer. It is a pretty amazing passage if you have never seen it or heard it; do check it out.

It is almost never on any audition lists, because if it were almost no players could win any jobs. I played it on Holton descant, now replaced with a Paxman; definitely an excerpt for descant or triple horn.

The other excerpt I put on the tape was recorded the previous summer also at Brevard. It is the solo at the end of the first movement of Brahms 2. I don’t think you can find a recording much slower than this one, a real challenge for breath control. This I played on the big Paxman 25AND that I also used on my two later solo recordings on the Summit label.

So, if you are wondering if college professors are players, I am a player; give these two clips a listen. Right now I am re-tooling my personal playing a bit around more of a soloist mindset, but I can play and teach orchestral lit on a high level.