Recorded Preliminary Round
San Francisco Symphony just sent out a message saying that their committee has opted to do a recorded preliminary round in February, with semis and finals in April for their Section Viola audition. As far as I'm aware, this is a novel approach to have a time-limited recording period, and one that I hope other organizations emulate to respect the time and financial constraints of applicants.
Below is from their message to applicants:
Here is how the Recording-Only Preliminary Round will function:
Candidates will receive the preliminary round repertoire list at 12pm (Noon) PST on Tuesday, February 24.
Candidates will have until 12pm (Noon) PST on Thursday, February 26 to submit their recording.
The recordings must be done in one take and in the order of the list with no editing.
As this is a blind audition, only audio will be accepted, and candidates must not speak in their recording.
For the best possible audio quality, it is highly recommended that candidates record their preliminary round audition using an external microphone.
Any submission that does not follow these guidelines may be ineligible and not reviewed in the preliminary round.
No late submissions will be accepted.
We expect to inform candidates by Monday, March 2, 2026 whether they have advanced to the live semifinal round taking place at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall on April 13, 2026.
Please note that the bolded excerpts for the full repertoire list will be sent to candidates invited to a live round. These bolded excerpts will not be requested for the recording-only preliminary round.
Rainer Eudeikis, principal cello of SFS, gave his opinion on this process on a recent episode of the Cello Sherpa podcast. His opinion was that this recorded prelim works best when the committee is very selective, so that fewer candidates are ultimately invited to the live rounds.
Cheating is of course easier but they still have to play 2 live screened rounds if advanced, so it's easily disincentivized.
He also made the interesting point that the taped prelim (and using tapes in general) allow for younger players with less audition experience to fairly compete for jobs.
I'm not personally sure whether the financial and time benefit outweighs the many more variables now in the equation. While it certainly alleviates the financial burden on candidates, recordings can exacerbate a lot of inequities (instrument quality, recording quality, etc.) compared to a screened audition. Recordings are very expensive to do well if costs/time/space aren't provided by an institution.
Either way, it is an interesting experiment and I would like to see more results from this! You can listen to the episode here.