Auditions are a really defining moment for all the hard work you’ve put in during the preceding months/years in preparation. In ten minutes or less, you have to convince the panel of judges sitting behind a screen (and most likely making faces at you while eating donuts) that, out of the sixty bassoonists to show up, you are the one they really want to hire. The others are just hacks.
So, how do you do that? Simple. Don’t play like a hack. How do you do that? Easy. Just play everything perfectly. No problem! And whatever you do, don’t mess up the “Marriage of Figaro” excerpt. If you do, you may as well stop and walk out, because you just sounded like a hack.
I’ve taken four auditions in the past year, and in two of those auditions, I screwed up the Figaro. Hundreds of travel dollars, days away from home, months of practice were literally laid waste when I did that. Frustration would not cover what I felt when that happened. Here is an excerpt that I thought I could play without any problem at all, and yet, when it really counted, I couldn’t. I decided I’m not going to let that happen again.
Anybody else had that happen? I think the problem is simple, yet hard to admit: You never could play it well enough in the first place. Once you swallow that bitter pill, the solution is equally simple, yet an absolute pain to go through.