Orchestral excerpt

The excerpt list for any given instrument is small and remarkably stable: the same twenty or thirty passages appear at auditions decade after decade, because each one isolates a specific difficulty, a bow style, a rhythm that has to be exact, a register that exposes intonation, an entry that has to be perfectly placed.

Preparing an excerpt is different from learning the passage inside the piece. The panel is listening for tempo, rhythmic accuracy, character, and the specific trouble spot that the excerpt exists to expose, and they will hear a passage played at the wrong tempo as a failure regardless of how cleanly it is played.

Knowing the surrounding context still matters, because the character of a passage comes from what it accompanies or answers. The standard advice, listen to a recording of the whole movement before practising the excerpt, is sound.