The Ride is typically on a first round audition for an orchestral job and is considering one of the “standard” excerpts. Along with the rhythmic and low register accuracy that must occur, we need to have a musical plan for this excerpt.
With this excerpt I try to highlight the cadences that are at the beginning of every fourth bar. I’ve marked the cadence points in the red boxes below. Take a second and play each box individually so it sounds like a cadence. The first two cadence points should sound like a stereo-typically “V-V-I” bass pattern. The last two should sound like a “ii-V-I” cadence. If you take a look at the score, the string tremolos support these chord progressions.
To help showcase these cadence points, I put a slight crescendo on the second and third measures of each four bar phrase. You have two options on how to create this crescendo. The first method is to execute a long crescendo over the second and third bar. This option is notated below with a blue crescendo.
The second option for a crescendo is to play each bar slightly louder than the previous bar, this is notated below by a blue text box. The advantage of this method is that the second beat will never sound louder than the first beat, which would happen if you do a long term crescendo.
For either of the above phrasing methods to work effectively, we cannot start at double-forte, instead back the volume down to a forte or a strong mezzo-forte.