Show Notes
Everything would have been so easy if we’d just known then what we know now! In this episode, we revisit what auditioning was like back when we started, and what’s changed for us as we’ve both taken, and judged, so many orchestra auditions.
Nathan likes to compare auditions to blind dates: you’ve only got a minute to show what kind of player you are, and all the details you’ve worked so hard to refine need to add up to a beguiling package.
Akiko talks about how it’s all about playing to your strengths while deftly concealing your weaknesses. Some of those weaknesses may be with you all the time, while others may only show up under pressure. You have to be savvy enough to know what’s coming when the spotlight’s on you.
We discuss what immediately signals to us that someone’s a great player, or not-so-great. Then we each finish with an audition blunder from our early days. Nathan’s involves the cadenza to the Brahms violin concerto, while Akiko’s has her playing for a friend the night before the big day.
More from Stand Partners for Life
Shostakovich had never had it worse: his latest opera, Lady Macbeth, had been panned. And not just by an ordinary critic: Joseph Stalin himself had paid a visit to the opera house. The official Soviet opinion of the work? “Muddle instead of music.”
Have you ever “discovered” a major piece, live, in the concert hall? Nathan remembers sitting right next to a big star performing Prokofiev’s second Piano Concerto, with its massive and breathtaking first-movement cadenza. Then he and Akiko talk about sitting right next to another big star this week for the same piece.
This week’s landmark episode marks the return of Akiko, plus a pair of fellow stand partners for life: violists Kate Reddish and Eric Lea! We discuss the slings and arrows of a career in music, what you can and can’t get from music school, what it’s like to be part of a string-playing pair, and much more.
I’m joined in the backyard this week by Violympian and VMC participant Travis Maril, as well as his fellow USC alum and my Director of Operations, Kate Reddish. Our wide-ranging conversation includes no small measure of pedagogical geekery, as well as such diverse topics as Tae Kwon Do bribery and Michael Jordan’s private Space Jam gym.
Nathan, Kerstin and Kate (and Kate’s SPFL Eric) in Pasadena