So, this weekend’s second professional musical appointment was at ten to eleven on Saturday morning, at some rehearsal rooms in a grubby mews just down the road from the Wigmore Hall. I was auditioning for an orchestral seat in the first part of the ROSSINI 2016 opera festival, and they had asked to me play violin for the audition.

The interesting bit about this particular audition was that I’d had only about 36 hours to prepare for it – alongside finishing the additional string arrangements for the Filthy Spectacula album, and being away from home to test the waters with Kindred Spirit (see previous post).

Now sight-reading Rossini fortunately requires no specific preparation (and my sight-reading is never really allowed to get out of practice as a skill! one of the benefits of a freelance and dep playing career). However, I was lucky that I had the Presto from the Bach G minor solo violin sonata (#1) reasonably well polished up from last weekend’s (very different) audition, and was able to quickly restore it to as happy as I was likely to get performance standard. It perhaps isn’t what I would choose as audition piece for early Romantic orchestral playing work, but at that amount of preparation time neither auditionee nor auditioner beggars can be choosers.

So another application I await the outcome of; which at least brings me to Saturday afternoon and the first directly paid appointment of the weekend. Check back for the next instalment …