"Auditions, Anxiety, and the Myth of Flawless Playing" - An Interview with Clinical Psychologist, Ellen Hendriksen

A top-level orchestra audition after a 16-year break sounds like a nightmare, until you hear how Craig Mulcahy rebuilt his process and walked away with the Principal Trombone seat in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Craig shares what pushed him to look beyond Washington, D.C., how uncertainty around the Kennedy Center changed his risk math, and why “audition shape” is a separate, intense kind of training even for seasoned principal players. Along the way, we get practical about the unglamorous...

A world-class string quartet can look effortless on stage, but the reality is closer to running a small business with no off switch, and doing it with the same three people for years. We’re joined by cellist Tate Zavadiuk, founding member of the Viano String Quartet, to get honest about how a professional chamber music career is actually built: one relationship, one rehearsal, and one hard conversation at a time. Tate takes us back to his earliest days with the cello, Suzuki training, and the...

Bach’s cello suites are some of the most recorded, most studied music ever written, which raises a risky question: can you add anything to them without breaking what makes them timeless? We explore that question with Brick House Duo, cellist Jennifer Kloetzel and violinist Peter Wilson, as they share the story and craft behind their album The Bach Wilson Project and the life partnership that powers it. Peter’s path is anything but standard: he spent 30 years as a Marine violinist with “...

He had the conservatory training, the orchestral chops, and the “proper” classical path laid out ahead of him, but Sebastian Plano couldn’t ignore the stronger call: make his own music. We sit down with the Grammy-nominated cellist and composer to trace the real turning points, from leaving Lisbon on a one-way ticket to Boston, to realizing that interpretation alone was not enough, to building a creative life where the cello becomes both voice and laboratory. We dig into the craft behin...

Your bow is the only part of your rig you touch every second you play, yet most of us shop for one like we’re guessing in the dark. We sit in a room, try ten options, get overwhelmed by “better” and “worse,” and somehow leave with more confusion than we started with. That’s why we brought on Evan Orman, a working cellist who became a full-time bowmaker and now spends his days repairing, restoring, and building bows for real players. We talk through Evan’s path from serious conservatory traini...