Hello, my friends!
This week’s Orchestra of Life Weekly is a tribute to the Olympics. We are all watching heroic, super human achievement daily, and marveling at what these brilliant athletes can do.
I was today reminded of a YouTube video of a Mock Audition for a chair in an orchestra.
To be in a professional orchestra, you have to go through a series of auditions. Each orchestra has their own methods, but basically, you are given a list of orchestral excerpts to perform. The first run of auditions are done behind a screen in front of a committee of orchestra musicians and the music director. The screen is spans the stage so that your identity cannot be discovered. In many circumstances, you are asked to remove your shoes so that your gender will not be discovered as well.
But in the final audition, you walk onto the stage alone in front of the judges and must perform.
In this video, a mock audition, the player is given the opportunity to feel what it is like to do a real audition. This is a hornist who plays the terribly difficult Horn Call from the Wagner opera, Siegfried. The excerpt has several parts.
This is the closest thing to the real audition experience, and in my mind, the Olympic Trial in the orchestra world.
The hornist, now a professional, recorded this 11 years ago.
Hope you enjoy! This is real life in the orchestra career.