by The Dormouse

Created on: February 25, 2007   Last Updated: April 03, 2007

Auditions are a hard fact for any performer. It's only when you get to the top of your particular career ladder that you may find yourself booked directly for work through your agent rather than having to go to standard casting calls with anything up to 50 other people who do what you do.

For the purposes of this answer, I'm going to give my tips and tricks on what I do. I'm a professional opera singer, and auditions tend to differ from those for actors, although there are some similarities to audition requirements for instrumentalists and musical theatre performers.

Types of auditions - audition requirements differ for soloists and choristers. If you are auditioning to join a professional opera chorus, you will more than likely be required to attend a "cattle call" audition, with up to a hundred other people of your voice type. You are unlikely to be referred to by name (it's most likely that you will be allocated a number), and it's also unlikely that you will have more than two minutes allocated to you, so choose something which shows your best vocal qualities in the first page. Additionally, choose something from the more "lyric" end of your repertoire. Choruses are looking for people who make a good sound. If you make it through the first cut, and get a chance to sing another area, that's the point to show what you can really do, as opera companies often cast small covers from the chorus, and will want to know how versatile you are.

A principal audition will be somewhat different. These tend to fall into two different categories - the "general" audition (where you are auditioning for a vacancy for your voice type, or "fach"), and a specific call for a specific role.

At a general audition, you should take five arias and be prepared to sing three. Make sure they are all appropriate for your voice type - a lot of opera singers have a foot in two, or even three fachs, and it's perfectly acceptable for, say, a dramatic soprano to use lyrico-spinto repertoire, or, if her voice is flexible, dramatic coloratura repertoire in an audition. A good benchmark is to do your research on who has recorded what - if a precedent has been set on CD by someone with your voicetype, you have ammunition for seizing this repertoire for yourself! Your arias should be a good mix of languages and styles, whilst showing who and what you are vocally.

Obviously, a call for a specific role will have slightly different requirements. It sounds obvious, but make sure you've looked at every

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