Steven Isserlis

Now, I know I’ve written about this before, but Facebook posts have a bad habit of sliding quickly into obscurity. And this rant is inspired, as I suspect the previous one on the same subject was, by my annual task of listening to audition tapes for my course at Prussia Cove, Cornwall. Each year I get disturbed by some people’s choice of repertoire for their tapes. (Actually, they’re not tapes, they’re videos – they have to be, because we’ve had some fake audio tapes in the past; but these days my friend David Waterman, who always helps me with the process, sternly sits me down in a corner of the room where I can’t see the screen, so that it’s scrupulously fair. So therefore: tapes to me. Or does the use of that word date me horribly?)

It is extremely hard to judge properly from these recordings – I know that we’ve made serious mistakes in the past, and will do so again in the future. There’s no way to be 100% accurate. And I’ve often retold the tale – from the times when we received audio tapes, and I used to feed them into the machine – of slipping in recordings of myself, and being failed (or to be more precise, almost failed, until David, or whoever was helping me in those days, suddenly realised that it was me!). Interested though I always am to hear new talent, it is a rather torturing (as well as tortuous) process to wade through these auditions – especially with the knowledge that in the case of a popular course such as PC, we can admit fewer than 10% of the applicants into the class.

So – here are some shreds of advice that I’d like to offer candidates for this and other courses:

1) Try to present a mixture of the usual and unusual. If you send only the most famous pieces in the repertoire, you’re going to be up against high standards. Maybe it’ll be fine – but you have to have a lot of confidence to do that. On the other hand, it’s essential that you offer SOME standard repertoire. If an application consists only of offbeat repertoire, which the teacher is unlikely to know, then it’ll prove impossible to judge the quality of the playing precisely enough – resulting in rejection.

2) Avoid pieces that are merely a vehicle for virtuosity. Perhaps if one is auditioning for a place in a year-round class, it might be useful for the prospective teacher to know how advanced your digital skills are; but for a course like PC, where one assumes that anyone who applies has attained a pretty high level of virtuosity, it’s just not interesting to hear the fingers whizzing around the strings (or keyboard or whatever). It does seem like rather unnecessary showing off. And besides, one can tell perfectly well the state of a player’s technique from their performances of the classics.

3) Using pieces you’re preparing for a competition – be careful! Of course, if you’re entering a competition, you have to be working on the repertoire, so in a way it makes perfect sense to use those pieces for your tape; but oh dear… I never imagined that Mendelssohn’s Variations Concertantes, a piece that I truly love, could elicit a groan; but this year, by the twentieth time the opening sounded through the speakers, I was almost ready to kill myself. Try to think what others may be sending…

4) Playing solo Bach is quite a gamble – speaking for myself, I am very happy when I hear a fresh, genuine performance of one of the suites (or sonatas or partitas); but so often I hear the ‘theories’ of a player – or worse ,a player’s teacher! – coming through, and it’s very hard to overcome my admitted prejudices against ‘idea-laden’ playing. And I’m by no means alone in that!

5) If at all possible, make sure that the sound quality is decent. Schools should, and often do, offer recording sessions free as part of their course; but I realise that it can be tricky to come up with something professional-sounding, especially if you’re not attached to any institution. But if you send something recorded with an I-phone in your kitchen, you’re going to be at a distinct disadvantage when heard straight after a CD-quality tape. Hopefully the quality of your playing will transcend such a drawback – but better not to start with such a handicap if you can avoid it.

Finally: if your application isn’t successful, try to be as detached from it as possible. Easier said than done, I know; and I’m definitely not one to preach, being prone to major sulks when I’m rejected on which I’ve set my heart – as still happens… Rejection is never pleasant; but in cases like this, and often in the larger musical profession, you can at least remember that in the end judgement comes down – in an alarmingly large number of cases – to chance. As I said, at Prussia Cove, as at many courses, we have to turn down more than 90% of the applications. There are so many elements involved – many of them out of your (or even our) control. But perhaps the above advice might help just a little for your future auditions – I hope so…