Audition Prep Season: Part 2--Solo Piece

So for those of you who have been keeping up with my blog, you know that my last post was about how I went about preparing NYO's given excerpts for the application to the 2015 season. That post started out as a general post about how I prepared for NYO apps in general, but then because I realized it would be waaay too long I broke it into a series of posts, of which this one is (obviously) number 2. So if you missed my last post, check out the sidebar on the right or click here to read the whole thing. (Again, I warn you--it's a lot. I have a bit too much free time--or I'm just really bad at prioritizing.)

I decided to go a little out of logical order; you know, usually people think of solo pieces first, then excerpts, then the other stuff. I did excerpts first for this string of posts because I felt that the excerpts for NYO were more decisive than the solo pieces, in my opinion (of course, disclaimer: I do not claim to know how the judges selected anyone in particular or the orchestra as a whole). Yes, the solo pieces lets the viewer see your talent, musicianship, and personality, but for me the excerpts seemed a bit more important because 1. excerpts always serve as a sort of standardization technique among the auditionees, and 2. that is especially important for something like NYO where musicians from all states and all backgrounds are applying. So that is why I did excerpts first. But now I'm going to talk about my solo piece.
For my solo, I played the first three minutes of Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen, rather than any of the flashier parts at the end (which, honestly, I wasn't totally prepared to play). I had actually been working on this piece for a while: I think I played it for my May recital, the May after excerpts were released, and usually I work on my recital pieces for about two months. So I had about 7 months' worth of theoretical practice on my piece. (That's assuming, of course, that I practiced every day. And well, for that matter.) If you read my last post you know that I won't be posting the actual videos that I submitted this year to NYO, but if you'd like me to make another one for the 3-minute solo piece, to give you an idea of how much I played and how, be sure to leave that in the comments section below along with anything else you'd like to say.
When I was learning the piece for the first time I naturally worked through phrases and sections, focusing on intonation and technique, but as I got closer to the recording session (about one month before), I worked solely on the first 3 minutes. I started running through the whole 3 minutes a couple of times each time I practiced just to get a feel for different styles of shaping, and I didn't spend a whole lot of time fixing details (unless it was really obvious). I think the most important part of the solo is to make it sound like you, you know, how when you're listening to a recording, you can immediately identify which is yours just because your manner of playing is so familiar to you, so when I practiced my piece, that's what I was going for. I just really worked on making the piece sound super super familiar to me.
On the day of recording, I chose to record in my school's chorus room, because we have a nice Steinway there that I'm used to playing with. Because I'm über bad at planning ahead, I got one of my friends to accompany me as pianist, and we had two or three rehearsals before the recording. We took three takes, which I did for all my videos actually, except for one or two (I think) that I felt comfortable enough on to move on quickly. Something really useful to do is record with two cameras, so that you can look directly at one when you speak, and the other will be shooting from an angle (artsy), and the first camera will get your shots head-on, while the other camera will also get you at an angle (artsy), from which you can choose which videos to use later. And when it came time to submit my videos, another thing I did for all of them, excerpts, solo, and video essay alike, was that I edited them so that there was a short intro frame for each clip that stated what it was. They said this was totally not necessary, but I did it anyways because it was hard otherwise for me to figure out for myself which was which, and also it looked pretty (fonts) :) And for the solo, for the intro that I said, with my name, hometown, etc., I also put that as a caption on the video because I was worried I talked too quickly / the audio was too bad for them to hear.
So that is basically how I went about creating and submitting my solo video; it was one of my videos I felt more confident on when playing but also one of my less stellar videos when I went back and listened to it. I didn't have enough time to take another session, because it was my first time doing video auditions on DecisionDesk, so I just submitted one that didn't have too glaring a mistake. Speaking of submitting early on DecisionDesk, which I talked about in my last post a bit as well, submitting early is definitely a thing and you should definitely do it because the day after I submitted mine, DecisionDesk stalled or crashed or something, and there were like Facebook posts on NYO's page about it and people were freaking out so although they did fix it (NYO's really reliable like that, and in general), I can live without that stress in my life. That's one thing I'm glad I did.
Let me know if you liked this post at all; I could just keep going all day with these types of posts. Again, too much free time. But at least this time, I have an excuse: school just ended for me (no exams), so I won't feel too bad procrastinating college essays for a day or two (or a week or two). Yeah no, that's not really an excuse. Ah well, I'll continue anyways. I hope you liked this; if you did check out more on the right, and as always, stay tuned for more!