Generally, the best practices for picking repertoire are as follows:-Play things you are comfortable with. Playing a harder piece poorly will not get you in to the school.-Avoid warhorse pieces where possible, or limit them to one part of your program. Every faculty member will know those pieces better than you, and has likely played them since before you were born; so the expectations are incredibly high! Of course, you can't really do this for Etudes, as the whole point of the Etude requirement is to demonstrate your capacity to play a virtuosic, well-known piece with rock-solid technique.-The length of the piece is mostly irrelevant, as they will probably only ask for individual parts of the piece (such as a movement from a sonata, or the coda of the Ballade), though you never know what exactly they're going to ask for, so you should of course prepare all of it.With that in mind, I would recommend the Beethoven over the Mozart, just because Beethoven's work is typically easier to bring across convincingly, while Mozart is often very transparent and requires a special attention to detail that, despite all your best efforts at this time, may not satisfy the committee. Also, the Op. 90 is played much less often than the other Sonatas, so I think it is quite viable for an audition. I also recommend you pick the Polonaise over the Ballade--the Chopin Ballades are very famous and steeped almost two centuries of traditions, and the pressure will be on to play it better than the dozens of other people who are also playing it that you're competing against to get into the school. You may or may not be better at it than they are; but it's best not to invite the comparison in the first place, and instead to push present your own pieces that represent you as uniquely as possible. On a side note for the modern works, might I also recommend you research the music of Florence Price? She's a very underrated black American composer, and I will be presenting one of her unpublished pieces, "Clouds," as part of my master's audition this coming fall.
Good advice. Where did you learn this? Are you experienced with doing auditions?
Topic: Conservatory Audition Repertoire 