Merci--we'll call you: William Christie's apprentice program, Le Jardin des Voix, is no place for amateurs.

As New Zealand--born soprano Jayne Tankersley put it, "the place to be" for aspiring early-music singers one bitterly cold afternoon last February was Lincoln Center's Kaplan Penthouse, where Baroque-music patriarch William Christie was holding auditions for his exclusive apprentice program, Le Jardin des Voix. For two hours, his staff moved like a well-oiled machine, ushering candidates in and out of the master's presence.

Behind a long table, fifty feet from three alternately tempered harpsichords and adjacent to a slew of chairs for the press, sat a stone-faced Christie; next to him were Jacqui Howard, production manager for Les Arts Florissants, and Jardin des Voix codirector Kenneth Weiss. It was something of a Baroque American Idol, or, in light of well-publicized claims of curmudgeonly behavior by Christie, perhaps an early-music version of The Apprentice, with the conductor cast as Donald Trump. A sharply iterated "Vous etes termine!" would have surprised few.

Tankersley, who once sang a solo engagement under Christie's baton in a Harvard performance of a Charpentier Mass and now found herself a candidate for Jardin des Voix, admitted to feeling the pressure. "There are so many stories about him," she acknowledged. "I think that he has a responsibility to produce the best-quality product that he possibly can, and he'll always go about whatever it is that he has to do to get that."

Initiated in 2002 for young singers specializing in Baroque repertoire, Le Jardin des Voix has held auditions in London, Paris, Cologne, Vienna and this year, for the first time, in New York. Sixty-seven candidates were invited to audition on the basis of application recordings. Those selected will take part in two weeks of intensive study at Theatre de Caen during February 2005. A particularly lustrous addition to the resume follows: a tour with Les Arts Florissants and appearances in Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series.

But, as can be expected, the hours leading up to many of the applicants' auditions seemed decidedly less glamorous: more of a testament to Murphy's Law than to any tried-and-true tenets on audition preparation or technique.

"My audition was horrible," laughs Tankersley, who encountered some difficulty in navigating the words of her Rodelinda ...