T - 10 days

One metric week before the BSO audition and all systems are go. I'm not delusional. Horn players don't go from playing with the DSO to playing with the BSO in one fell swoop. But the way I see it, any audition for The Show is a worthwhile experience. I don't understand players who say they aren't ready to play at that level yet so why bother auditioning for that level. You bother with it so that when you finally get to that level you have all this experience in the bank. You bother with it to eliminate uncertainties so the audition process becomes old hat. I know what train takes me to Symphony Hall, what the fare costs and how long the ride is. I know there will only be ten to twenty players total as opposed to the usual cattle call. I've been in the practice rooms (modules, really) in the basement already. I know what it feels like to play in them. I know I'll have to climb a flight of stairs to get to the hall. (That may not sound like much but it is enough to get the heart pumping a little extra hard right before you go on and play.) I know I'll be able to hear the candidate playing before me as I wait in the green room to go on. I know the committee will be on stage with me with a screen separating us, as opposed to way out in the dark hall somewhere. I know the hall will sound absolutely amazing; distractingly so (though it did just get a new stage floor). Any one of these things can shake your mind off task enough so that you do something stupid during the few minutes you have on stage. And all of them can combine to reduce you to a jello mold of a real horn player...and not even the kind with bananas! There most certainly will be new things this time which pop up to distract me, as there are at every audition. I'll just put those in the bank too.

I'll try to play the list for as many people as will hear it during the next two concert sets (DMS this weekend & CRSO next weekend), especially the Bach cello suite movement, which was the first thing asked for in the last BSO audition in January. It is much stronger now but I've not performed it at all since then. Maybe I'll try and play it for a cellist and see what they say. I got in touch with my friend, DC, whose a horn player and Boston resident so hopefully we'll be able to meet up for a visit while I'm there. She was kind enough to put me up for the last audition but this time I'm going to hotel it.

This week we have LL as a guest conductor/soloist. He is very French and very animated and it is a nice change of pace. He's been much more overtly focused on musicality (phrasing, color, style, character,etc.) in rehearsals than we're used to. It gave me the feeling of being at a summer festival back in college for some reason.

As I mentioned in the last post, we are doing the same Schumann symphony (No. 4) as CWSO did last week. The horn parts are ho-hum but it is growing on me. Oh, and as a addendum to the last post, I'll be playing Shostakovich 10 again with the DSO in November. So it'll be 14 years between my first two performances of this piece and about 14 days before my third performance. And yet again, I'll be on assistant!