Need Help With College Audition!

[thepianist2008]

My first audition is on January 19, and I don't even have the notes solid yet! I went in yesterday during school and played my pieces for my chorus teacher and my band teacher, and it was terrible. They both said my technique was great, but there were many wrong notes.

Here's the thing: For some odd reason, wrong notes have always been acceptable for my teacher. She just moves on to do dynamics and other things, which are great too, but it really is unacceptable to be playing all those wrong notes. Now I've got a huge problem to correct and I don't know how to do it. Every time I isolate a passage and really work on getting the notes right, they just slip away again when I go to perform the piece. Even notes that I thought I was sure on get messed up! What do I do? I can't start a career without college, so I've got to get into at least one, no matter what it takes.

By the way, I'm playing Bach's Prelude and Fugue in Cmin from WTC, Beethoven's "Pathetique", Chopin's Heroic Polonaise, and Debussy's Reflets Dans L'Eau. I think they're all too hard for me, except the Debussy, because I've been working on them for months and I still don't have the notes down.

Any kind of help would be very appreciated.

[amelialw]

if those pieces are too hard for you...well you should even be playing those for your auditions, why did'nt you keep some of your older pieces? even if those pieces are easier, you still would have a better shot at it as you are already familiar with them.

my advice would be to bring some of those pieces back but it's too late, so I don't know.

My teacher would never let me bring a piece into an audition, recital or competition without the notes solid as well as all of the elements and little details.
In fact I always have notes learnt within a week or 2 and i'll be in trouble if I don't.

for now your best bet is to spend every single day you have on those pieces, spend time on and off the piano learning notes, go through the score carefully.
1 or 2 wrong notes are acceptable not a whole lot though, your teacher should spend time with you and make sure you get those notes right.

a good teacher would do that anyway. but i'm just warning you, if you know that you aren't well prepared, you may not get into any, I know it's tough but things like that happen and we have to accept it. It happened to me 2 years ago and i've been just taking lessons from my private teacher for that period of time and will be doing auditions next year again.

regardless of that, all the best to you.

[slobone]

I recommend a LOT of slow practice. Every day, go through all your pieces at a slow tempo with the metronome on before doing anything else. By slow I mean somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of performance speed (you probably don't need to do this for slow movements).   

Even if you feel you could play the pieces correctly at a faster speed, do them slowly anyway. Don't worry about phrasing or dynamics, just make sure the pitches, rhythms, fingering and articulation are correct. And of course, if you do make mistakes at the slow tempo, isolate the passage and do it over and over until you can do it perfectly.

I don't recommend going back to older pieces at this point unless you played them really well and they're fresh in your memory. You probably don't have enough time to revive them otherwise.

Is this the place to launch a diatribe against teachers who rush students through pieces before they've been learned properly? Naah, I'll save that for another thread...

[amelialw]

haha...we could post a new thread discussing that.