auditioning for middle-farts, part deux

On the morning of Friday the 19th I’ve driven up to a home of two good friends in the Dash Point area. I take an hour to get I-5 out of my bloodstream, then go over the whole range of music that I need to be ready to play that afternoon. My audition time slot is a range of between 5:00 – 6:45 p.m. I need to arrive at around 4:15 to get a warm-up room and be ready to get the list of excerpts that will be required for the preliminary round.

After a couple of wrong turns on the maze of one-way streets that is downtown Seattle, I find my way into the beautifully appointed (and exhorbitantly priced) Benaroya Hall parking garage. I’m met at the Artist’s Entrance by a solicitous volunteer, and make my way down to my warm up room in the backstage area of the hall. I’m given a nice dressing room, (replete with window, tuner and metronome) and await the list of excerpts, which will be presented to me approximately 45 minutes before my audition slot. I noodle nervously and wait.

The list comes, and it is a mixed bag. I’m to play a portion of the Bach solo piece, then the excerpts. The first excerpt is my personal nemesis: the last movement of the Mozart Symphony No. 35 ‘Haffner’. The run of quick notes which marks the retransition in the last movement has brought many a fine violist to their knees, and this has been one of those excerpts which has stubbornly resisted all of my attempts to either seduce, cajol, or beat into submission. Next comes the beautiful section solo from Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, a nasty passage from late in Strauss’ Don Juan, the treacherous leaps from Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Variation VII from Brahms’ Haydn Variations, and the sphincter-clenching solo from Ginastera’s Variaciones Concertantes.

The preliminary round is being held in the smaller recital hall rather than the main auditorium. It is still a pretty lively space, thankfully, so it is a nice change from the bone dry acoustic of the warm-up room. Also welcome is the lack of major temperature changes between all of the playing areas and their commuting passageways.

My number and Bach movement are announced to the committee as I make my way onstage. I play the Bach, and it feels pretty comfortable, I’m adapting well to the space so far. The Mozart feels like I’m trying to recite French poetry with my mouth full of peanut butter and crackers. Ugh – this might be a short trip! The Mahler goes well, my confidence starts to rebound a bit. The Don Juan, which begins pp with quick as a flash 16th notes is a bit clumsy at the start, but gains clarity as I go along. The Copland is relatively in tune, and I’m managing not to crunch all of the sfz’s and accents, which I grimly remember doing in Philly at my last audition. The Brahms goes well, and the Ginastera goes surprisingly well. Overall, I feel decent about the round, but I’m listening with hyper-critical ears, and rate myself 5-6 out of 10. Aside from the start of the Mozart, nothing went terribly, but I didn’t feel that the level was especially high overall. I’m not really expecting to advance, and I pack up my stuff and wait for the results in the musicians’ lounge.

My group consists of five people, and we must wait for everyone to play before the committe can deliberate and make its decision on who advances from our group. I know one person in my group, whose husband I knew well from undergrad, and we make a bit of smalltalk while we wait. Gradually I turn to my book and iPod to get away from the distant sounds of muffled excerpts that continue to seep through the walls from the other warm-up rooms.

After about 30 minutes, the personnel manager comes in and thanks us all for our time and sacrifice that we’ve expended to come to the audition. Two candidates have advanced to the semis, and I am one of them! I am truly dumbfounded – I was really only coming to try to play well and feel happy with how I played, and now I have actually advanced – regardless of what now happens, I feel like I’ve proven to myself that I still have what it takes and that I am up to the standard required to be competetive in a major audition.

I return to my hosts’ home for a wonderful dinner and then head downstairs to woodshed everything that I felt didn’t go as well as I would have liked today. The committee issued written comments from the first round, and I read these and go over what they have noted as needing improvement. It’s a nice surprise, to receive these comments, and it helps to focus me for the next round’s rigors. I work from around 9:00 to 10:30 p.m., then watch an episode of ‘Dirty Jobs’ with my friends, then turn in, utterly exhausted from a long day of driving, playing, and fretting.

To be continued…