The Flute Audition

Henrik Wiese, the internationally renowned orchestral and solo flautist, has spent four years compiling what promises to be the definitive guide to audition repertoire for students preparing for a seat in a professional orchestra. He has worked with his own students in Salzburg as they engaged in auditions, as well as with other professional players and his teaching colleagues at the conservatorium. He sourced repertoire lists from job advertisements past and present and referred to other audition lists such as those of Baxtresser and Wye.

Considerable research has gone into the differences between existing editions of the chosen pieces even, surprisingly, from twentieth century composers such as Prokofiev and Stravinsky. “The Flute Audition” then looks at practical matters such as page turns and metronome markings. Wiese comments, for example, that Hindemith’s own recording takes a passage from “Symphonic Metamorphoses” markedly slower than in the score. The result of all this painstaking research is the most comprehensive collection of international audition pieces yet published in a single volume.