Small labour pool my ***, there are more freelancers in London alone than in any other country’s entire ecosystem. If London orchestras gave a rat’s *** about actually hiring the best player for the job, they would do more due diligence than handing their positions over to their buddies. Otherwise, they can suffer the mass exodus of talented musicians seeking employment overseas.

Not 100% true. The recent timpani trialists were not among those who auto-advanced. Auto-advances are typically given to candidates who've played a considerable amount of times as subs in the vacant position. If you've subbed with them enough, you can write in to request an auto-advance (I think this only applies in the case of a principal chair) and they can accept or deny at their own discretion. NACO has a very particular orchestral In the case of a candidate being "sick", that's actually really benevolent of them. It's not any indication that they're fixing the result, but rather that they actually want to invest their efforts into properly selecting a winning candidate from the best available pool. If I spent months practicing for an audition, got to a final, and got sick, I would be pretty happy that the orchestra is giving me space to play at my best. If I were another candidate I don't think I'd feel very miffed given that they're paying for me to travel there in a final round. Have there been some complaints about their audition procedures? Not significantly more than for any other orchestra. Sometimes the name of the game is to accept that an audition is not totally fair, try to do your best regardless, and stop holding onto the hope that you will win a particular job because you practiced hard.

Ehhh look, every orchestra has internal politics that make it so certain candidates are preferred over others. I take it that this is especially prominent in string sections where the principal has a pretty firm idea of what the sound should be. I wouldn't go as far as to say "stay away from such and such an orchestra", you just keep auditioning and if you manage to get far in one, that orchestra likes you! Ottawa is admittedly very expensive to travel to, not much in the way of connectivity to other parts of the world for a capital city. Especially for candidates coming in from other parts of Canada, it can be as expensive as flying transatlantic. Canadian orchestras on the whole should be aware of this and open themselves more to taped prelims. It's not like over here in Europe where I can fly to an audition for 10 euros.

Vancouver is a strange circumstance: The city is huge and very prominent internationally but the orchestra isn't really as big on the world stage as Montreal or Toronto. They don't really tour outside of regional activity, recordings don't happen as much as they used to, and the salary there doesn't even reach the cost of living, so I would imagine that with other trombone jobs on the horizon in the country, not much interest in this one in particular.

A follow up, now that I’ve had some time to observe things up close. UK orchestras: The procedure in the UK is strikingly different. Candidates will be asked to submit a CV for a vacancy. The CV round will be heavily discriminatory and only a tiny handful of applications will get a live audition. Auditions don’t happen by competitive rounds, but rather by time slots where you will play down a list of excerpts, usually unscreened and very informally like a job interview rather than an audition. From the auditioned candidates the committee is at discretion to advance any or none to a trial period* which will last an indefinite amount of time, during which candidates will rotate in the vacancy week to week until the orchestra picks one that they’ve liked the best and offer them tbe job. *It’s a common practice in the UK that audition candidates don’t actually make it to trial, but that these are instead given to peers already in orchestras/on the sub list. The way the UK works is that there’s very little rehearsal time allotted to a given program, often none at all, so the committee prefers to give the job to someone already tested in the field. What this means in practice is that an audition for a vacancy is more likely a chance for an unknown player with a great CV to get a spot on the sub list, whereas the vacancy will be given out to trusted individuals only. The orchestra system in the UK also operates near totally on a freelance contract basis, meaning that when you occupy a chaired position in the orchestra you’re more or less tied contractually to a minimum number of services, but can choose any number beyond that minimum. Given that Uk orchestras operate year round and are always on tour (sometimes the same orchestra can be conspicuously sighted playing two concerts on the same night in different countries…) they prefer to operate as an umbrella corp under which players shuffle in and out of chairs as needed per gig. As such, UK players are paid per service rather than salaried. You can imagine the strain this puts on you if you go into this being used to the day job model of an American or EU group. It’s not for everyone, and it’s a very exclusive club. My advice is if you have the liberty of choosing, go for the EU. After Brexit many EU orchestras have chosen to specify that candidates must already have work eligibility there, simply because of all the red tape…

Generally speaking it depends how much the orchestra sightreads on the job. In your standard American orchestra, you'll have a fair amount of rehearsal time before each week's concert and so sightreading is just in place as a measure to see the full extent of your skills. In Europe however, sightreading is an absolute must. Oh how the Americans have it easy, in major European orchestras' percussion sections for example, you often won't know what part you're playing (unless you're principal timpanist) until you show up to the gig. Often times the rehearsals are only for a single day before the concert, as you'll have multiple programs to shuffle through in the week including regional tours. It's often the case where an orchestra will rehearse for the friday concert on Monday, go on a 3 day tour with 2 different programs, come back early friday morning and play that initial concert without much in the way of a dress rehearsal. I can give you one amusing anecdote where I was the Southbank Sinfonia. I played a late night baroque concert on Friday, had to get up early in the morning to go teach after which I hopped on a train to meet the orchestra in Salisbury where we played an entirely different set of choral works on just the one dress rehearsal with a new conductor, then we all had to be wide awake after getting home around 1 am because the next day we had a 9 am call for Tchaik 5. Oh, and on the bus back from Salisbury we were informed that we'd be playing the Prokofiev Classical Symphony very shortly and wouldn't have a whole lot of lead time for this. SIghtreading saved the day a lot in that group. So I'd say.. in Europe it's pretty much a death **** if you can't sightread.

At the audition which I won in the UK, the sightreading was the 2 page solo xylophone passage from Britten's Death in Venice.... I expected SOME sighreading at a UK audition but this was pure ******.

Interesting, so how do you determine who gets invited? Is the personnel manager just fielding CVs discretely along a detailed requirements list?

Funny story, at one of my auditions (fully blind) in which I was a finalist I was told by the committee afterwards that they were convinced I was someone else just from the playing. Guess you never really CAN tell.

Congrats to her!

After 3 years spent living in Europe and applying near constantly, here's my experience so far. France - they have an open door policy for auditions. Anybody who applies will be heard on the prelim day at least. As an added bonus, the prelim round is always very short, about 5 minutes long, in order to circumvent the higher number of applicants. That's also why there's a "prelim day." The BIG downside (or upside depending on how you see it) is that they just love putting the most insane contemprary music on their lists. It's a good challenge if you're up for it, and I've definitely gotten a kick out of some of the chop busters I've shedded, but it is daunting. Germany - It's slightly more difficult, owing to how precise the career pathway generally is. However, if you already have a position in a major european orchestra, or if you decide to go study in Germany for a time, this can be much more easily achieved. Not to mention that with the visa offer somebody mentioned above, it's actually quite a bit easier to start working in German orchestras and get to know the field. At the very least, the excerpt lists tend to be very standardized and you can bet that 90% of them will be almost identical, so you can reasonably take on quite a few of these at once. Nordic countries invite everyone who passes a pre-screening round. Generally this is where a lot of the English speaking candidates go first. Makes sense, since English is usually their operating language. Repertoire is usually a mix of standards, some challenging standard etudes, and one or two excerpts from commissioned works by the orchestra. However, these lists are ENORMOUS in length. Italy generally requires that you be an EU resident or, in the case of non-EU natives, be residing and legally able to work in Italy. Lists tend to be the same style as in Germany. Spain is a total wildcard. Every orchestra will have strikingly different STRICT regulations for attending an audition. Some only require that you obtain a Spanish work permit before the mandated start date of the job, others require that you be an EU resident and show proof of Spanish proficiency. Some have been a bit more extreme, requiring that you submit official spanish translations of all diplomas obtained, as well as a B2 certification in the language and some even require that your degree curriculum contain all the same courses as the Spanish conservatories, with a year grace period to take those extra courses should you win the job. As with Italy, these lists tend to follow the German approach. Not sure about the Baltic/Slavic countries, and other countries such as Holland and Belgium depend hugely on the orchestra. I've been invited to auditions in LUxembourg but rejected from those in the Netherlands with the same CV. Generally in Europe they will not have a sizeable allowance in the operating budget to sponsor work visas so you will need to be an EU resident first. You may notice I didn't mention the UK (despite living her myself). They're a whole other can of worms and that's for another day, another time. I will briefly say that post-Brexit, it's really adviseable to aim for the contintent given how many more options you end up with. Hope this helps!

My hot take: those who are vehemently opposed to a recorded prelim are just scared of competing against someone from halfway across the planet. that’s the new normal though, get used to it.

I'm going to second the idea of having a tape option be mandatory for all orchestras, and I'm only basing this on my following experience as a foreigner living in the UK and attempting to get work here. I want to stress that in no way is this an indictment of the PEOPLE who run things in orchestra admins here, but rather a harsh consequence of the unfortunate situations that orchestras are faced with, and a proposal for what can be done to make things better. - Here in the UK, auditions are run on an extremely tight budget. IF the orchestra owns the hall (unlikely), they will usually run their auditions from there. HOWEVER, in London and other major cities the orchestras are usually "residents" of a hall, which means they don't have complete control over the bookings and must therefore resort to hosting auditions in third-party venues at the expense of the orchestra. I've seen everything from holding auditions in the basement of a church, to the practice studios of a major conservatoire, to renting out a rehearsal space with dead acoustics in the middle of nowhere. - As such, UK orchestras are incentivized to hear as few candidates as possible during the audition rounds so that they can get it all done in a single morning and reduce costs. I'm not sure if it's correlation or causation, but it fits into why the UK operates on a "trial basis", wherein rather than having a 3-round eliminatory audition they instead offer trials to likely candidates who will rotate in the vacancy for several seasons until a winner is selected. That's a good way to test exactly what is required from a candidate, but it also means that committees get hyper-selective about which CVs are even offered an audition. What will usually happen is that you can only receive an invitation to their auditions if you've a) played in their section before as a sub, b) played in another UK orchestra as a regular sub, or c) have already won a job elsewhere. Case and point: I applied for a non-London major orchestra vacancy, and my CV was rejected stating that they were specifically looking for candidates who had played in x number of top tier professional UK orchestras (which was not specified in the vacancy advert). My CV, containing 2 major internationally based groups, did not make the cut. Everyone who was invited was a recent sub with the orchestra in question. - This in turn means that there are far too many smaller "regional" UK orchestras who have to shortlist their audition candidates down to about 10-20 for an audition. These would be jobs that are perfectly suited for young early-career musicians (and these are also orchestras where many of the major pros have held their first jobs) but the auditions are only given out to seasoned pros who are already highly active in the major cities. The claim here is that they can't afford to invest their money into running a full-scale audition procedure, so they cut their candidates list down to those whose CVs indicate that they could perform a great audition. - However, as we all know succeeding in an audition and succeeding as a freelance sub are two different skillsets. My belief here is that while they mean well, they're unintentionally shooting themselves in the foot. How many excellent applicants get turned around at the CV round because they just haven't been given the opportunity yet to sub with a UK orchestra? Along those lines, there have been a lot of vacancies lately due to COVID-related resignations, retirements, etc. Not to mention that post-Brexit, a lot of the better players who came from Europe have jumped ship and gone on to pursue opportunities on the continent to be closer to home. If they're really looking for the best players to join them, it's a bit of a mismatch that they turn so many candidates away considering that there are now an over-abundance of players who are British citizens or residents but who don't have as lengthy of a CV as their european counterparts. If anything, this should be an incentive to give an audition to more under-experienced players. I think the mandatory inclusion of a tape round with the application could really help even out the playing field between those who are established freelancers and those just starting out. I can only speak personally, but I don't have the money nor the incentive to fly to Asia or America to make a career there in order to get invited to audition in the very country where I reside. I've seen some major orchestras (BBC Philharmonic and Royal Opera House) have started to ask for tapes as part of the application, and I'm hoping that this is a trend we can see continue, for the better. But those are just my two cents...

Recorded prelims should be a norm anyway, it's so freaking expensive to fly out for an audition you may as well only have to if you're in the semis or finals.

I can speak as a percussionist who emigrated to the UK. It’s not better over here, in fact it’s far worse than the American system. One clarification: In continental European countries they operate much more cleanly. For the most part, it is a cattle call system. Countries such as Spain and Italy require you to have proof of work permits in the EU, and language knowledge prior to the application. That is fair, IMO, as these orchestras won’t operate in English and should expect their applicants to have a reasonably comfortable level of communication in their language. The problem in the UK is two-fold. On one hand, they suffer from a considerable lack of operating budget when compared to American and Eurapean orchestras. They need to rent a building in which to host auditions and cannot afford to pay the committee for their time. In this respect, they are incentivised to get through the audition round as quickly as possible, hence the bulk of the actual process consisting of the trial later on. This does mean, however, that you do NOT stand a chance of getting invited to an audition as a newcomer to the country, which is a real shame if, let’s say, you win a fellowship in the UK like I did, spend a year playing with this orchestra, only to have 0 audition prospects on the other side simply because you haven’t had the time yet to score a gig with any of the major orchestras during your fellowship. Secondly, the trial process is indefinite. There are stories of orchestras not filling seats for years at a time because of ongoing trials, and you’re on rotation for the position during this period. This also means that you’re spending a considerable amount of time without a guaranteed income, which is especially a turn-off if across the pond you can win a job on the day of the audition. Yes, they are evaluating the skills that are required within the section during this time, but I would argue that this can be done more efficiently when you only have one candidate, who played a great audition, and they’re on full employment status but with probation. Way less stressful for the candidate, but also the committee gets to work with one person regularly to test the fit in the group, rather than having to cycle endlessly through 10-20 of them.