- The audition process is a very mysterious one.
And I say mysterious because
I did competitions when I was younger
and the times that I didn't think I played very well, I won
and the times that I thought I played great,
I didn't even pass the first round.
So I always asked myself, what were they listening for?
And I think one can not second guess the makeup of a jury
whether it's an orchestral audition or a competition jury.
I tell my students be true to what you know
and play your own game.
Play your own game is actually a phrase
that Sidney Harth told me once.
He said, when you go into a hall,
if it's live or if it's dead,
don't change the way you play,
just play the way you play.
That's the way you will feel comfortable.
You can't change the acoustics.
If it's a dead hall,
playing louder isn't going to make it sound any louder.
It's just going to be rough.
And it's the same thing musically,
you have to play what you know and the way you feel.
People can sense immediately
if what you're doing is not genuine,
is not honest.
And even the layman zeroes in on that very quickly,
whether things are being manipulated,
that there's a very fine line between
artistry and eccentricity, for example.
So when one plays an audition,
you have to have faith that
there are going to be a few people on the committee
that really know what you're doing.
And if you go in and play everything extremely safe
and correct,
I think that while that is good,
it's not going to be good enough,
because they also want a personality and a point of view.
And I hear that over and over again from my colleagues.
You know, plays well, but it has no point of view.
And this is one of the reasons
why the Boston Symphony will hold auditions
for four openings and not accept one person,
because they get people who are technically very good
and musically okay
but they all sound sort of the same.
And if we think about the artists that we admire,
none of them sound the same.
They all are unique.
And there is room for someone to be unique in an ensemble.
Quartets have unique sounds.
No two quartets sound the same.
Symphony orchestras have unique sounds.
I don't think any two symphony orchestra sound the same.
Vienna is very recognizable.
So when one takes an audition,
you present of course, very fine technical playing,
but musical ideas.
And I like to give you a couple of illustrations about this.
I had a student that I taught Bach to
the way I teach Bach,
which is I think in a very enlightened Baroque style
even though it's modern violin.
And she auditioned at both Oberlin and
at the Cleveland Institute.
She played Bach for Donald Weilerstein.
And she said he was overwhelmed.
He said, that's wonderful Bach,
where did you learn to play it like that?
And the next day she went to Oberlin
and auditioned with the same piece,
and the person that she auditioned for
screamed at her for 15 minutes
and said, you can't play Bach like that,
if you play like that in Cleveland
they'll laugh you off the stage.
I said, did you tell her
that you already took your audition in Cleveland
and he liked it?
She said, no I never got a chance to say anything.
So it's a different attitude, some people are threatened
by something that they don't know.
Other people are enlightened by things that they don't know.
I prepared a graduate student here
for an audition with the Houston symphony
and this was a brilliant violinist
who's now a conductor and violinist,
and he could play Don Juan perfectly from memory.
I could never approach playing Don Juan
the way he played Don Juan, it was spectacular.
So I knew that he was going to get to the final round
and in the final round, he had to play Mozart quartet.
And I said, Shenyang when you play this Mozart quartet,
it's gotta be in perfect style because
Eschenbach knows Mozart.
So we worked very much on trills and dance
and all of the aesthetics of the Classic period.
And I said, not only that,
it's not enough just to come in right,
you have to give everybody a cue,
whether it's your cue or somebody else's cue
just an eye contact is really important.
And he came to me after he won the audition
and he said you were so right.
He said, every time I began a troll the correct way
or gave a cue, I could see Mr. Eschenbach smiling.
That's really important.
A couple of years ago, we had a member of
the New York Philharmonic Audition Committee here.
And he gave a masterclass and a very fine student played
a beautiful performance of two pages of the
Scherzo of the Schumann Second Symphony.
And she played it perfectly,
like a Kreutzer etude
but it was just like sewing machine music.
That piece goes,
(mumbling music)
and that's the way she played it.
And he said, young lady, you played very, very well
but you will come in one side of the stage
and go out the other because you offer us no point of view,
no niceties.
And he explained, for example,
(mumbling music)
that's part of the musical phrase.
It's not
(mumbling music)
It's a phrase like real music.
Your teacher would never let you get away with playing
Brahms Concerto passages like that.
You shouldn't play a Schumann symphony like that.
So I think when one is prepared for an audition,
you go in and and play your best
and you don't worry about who's on the committee
or where you're playing.
You play a musical gesture for every phrase
with as nice a sound
and as accurate notes as you can muster,
and if they don't like it, it's their problem.
Not yours.
I know many people who are extremely fine musicians
who took audition after audition after audition
until they won one.
And I don't think they played any worse
on the early auditions than they played later.
It was just finding the right spot for them.
And that's really what it's all about.
Finding your spot.