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You don’t have to edit instrument names to stop Dorico numbering them automatically – in this case, putting your multi-instrumentalist in its own group would do this for you.
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Using separate players for the intermezzos vs the full flows sounds like a good idea: then simply remove the “intermezzo” player from the full flows, and ditto remove the full-flow-players from the intermezzo flows. Then, the follow up is to add the intermezzo player to all the other 4 part layouts if you want, so they can all see that music (as a part layout doesn’t have to contain just one player).
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Hi Estigy - Firstly, just to rephrase your question slightly, the last part should be “where only 1 player is present AT A TIME”. I think you understood that, but I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.
Meanwhile your suggestion does not work - and I’m beginning to see why people are not understanding the nature of the problem. AFAICT, Hiding/Showing System Dividers only works if you have ALSO checked ‘Hide empty staves’ under Vertical Spacing->Staff Visibility’. If I do not ALSO check ‘Hide empty staves’ then I will always have all 6 players present.
But I do NOT want to Hide empty staves in movements 1, 3, etc - I want to see the empty staves in these movements.
Lillie - if you’re reading this, please correct me if I’m wrong.
Hi Lillie -
I’ve been experimenting with this approach but I’ve hit some strange behavior so I’m sending this separate reply first. The behavior is that if I rename my multi-instrument player BEFORE I have assigned at least two instruments to the player, then I get both instruments on my score.
In this screen shot I created my new player, then immediately renamed it to “Intermezzo”, then assigned two violins. As you can see, I’m seeing both Violin 1 and Violin 2 at the bottom.
The solution is to first assign both violins to the player. Then it’s OK to rename the player.
But maybe I’m missing something?
Incorrect, whether or not system dividers are shown depends on your setting for showing them and the number of players active in any given system* (as demonstrated by your proofOfConcept2 project, where empty staves are always shown, but flow 4 doesn’t show them).
- Edit: actually, this may indeed be the number of players in the flow, rather than in specific systems. So in the setup with a single player holding all 4 intermezzo instruments, that’s below the threshold, but using 4 separate players for the intermezzo is above.
As outlined by others and myself above, you don’t need to hide empty staves at all if you use the setup in your proofOfConcept2 project (for flow 4) where an entirely separate player is used for the Intermezzos, allowing you to remove the “ensemble” players from those flows. If a player isn’t in a flow, its staves don’t exist and don’t need to be hidden (therefore the layout option can be to show empty staves, and your intermezzos will still only have one staff in each system).
As to your follow-up about renaming players – you’ll need to share the project file, because various factors go into determining instrument changes (for a start, are they allowed in the layout?). Renaming the player shouldn’t have anything to do with it.
Two fairly “clean” ways of getting a project setup that might work, as far as can understand what you’re trying to achieve:
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Have one separate single player, in its own group, holding 4 “intermezzo” instruments. Assign this player to Intermezzo flows, remove it from Ensemble flows (and vice versa for the 4 ensemble players). Never hide empty staves, and system dividers are automatically shown in ensemble flows but not in intermezzo flows. Assign the intermezzo player to all 4 parts – they’ll all see everyone’s music and the instrument changes between them.
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Use the same 4 players throughout. Hide empty staves everywhere, but add system breaks with manual staff visibility set to “Show” all 4 players at the start of the Ensemble flows – you can do this once for the first flow, then copy/paste the signpost in Write mode, it’ll carry its manual staff visibility settings. System dividers will appear in all flows, including Intermezzo flows. Each part layout only includes the music for one player (i.e. in the Intermezzo flows, the Flute only has the Flute music, not everyone’s)
If you don’t like either of those options, there are almost certainly several more ways of handling this, but you’ll have to work those out yourself I’m afraid 
Your best bet may be to have a second full score Layout for the Intermezzo Flows. You would have to do some manual page number changes and print to PDF and collate in an external program.
proofOfConcept v2.dorico (629.8 KB)
The separate Player option works OK for the small example file you provided but, for a full orchestra that would get cumbersome.
Hi Lillie -
As I said in my previous response, I’ve been experimenting with this approach. It sort of works for the full score, but it’s problematic for the parts.
For the full score it eliminates the system dividers, however I now see redundant instrument change instructions - it’s not terrible and I prefer this over the system dividers. I did have to edit the instrument names in order to get the “I” and 'II" in the violin names, but that’s easy enough.
However, for the parts layouts, after I add the multi-instrument player? I’m now seeing the notes for all players. I can sort of work around this by changing the scale for the sections where the player is not playing, but it would be much better not to see those at all. I’ve attached Violin I and Violin II - note that Violin I is not playing at all here.
Ultimately tho, I think you’d agree this is a LOT of effort to work around the inability to set hide empty staves (or use system dividers) on a flow by flow basis, yes?
Again (to repeat myself) - this is not a big deal in the larger scheme of things. 
Estigy:
Lillie has corrected me. The solution (as discussed by Lillie & me) is that you can add or remove players on a flow by flow basis. So I create a new player that holds all the instruments, then give that multi-instrument player the parts played by the other instruments, and then use only that player - then you do not see the system dividers.
But creating that multi-instrument player involves a substantial chunk of work and has other side effects.
Hi, @eheilner
I’m sort of confused. I had thought that the flows that only featured one player would only have this one player assigned. Then my solution would of course work, because there would really be only on player assigned.
One thing I still don’t quite understand: Is the one player that is playing in the Intermezzo a different player, or is it one of those that are already in your 6-player-setup?
As I read your description, I was thinking of something like this:
Flow 1: players A, B, C, D, E, F
Flow 2: only player C
Flow 3: players A, B, C, D, E, F again
Flow 4: only player F
In that way there would be no instrument change visible in the full score, no troubles with hidden staves etc.
The only downside of this is that in the parts you would have to manually insert some text to indicate to those players who don’t play during the “intermezzo” flows that there is something going on. (Because their part layout would not “know” about these flows.)
All flows have all 6 players. In Flows 2 & 4 only one player is playing at any time but they all play.
Aaaaah, now I see. The part “one player is playing at any time but they all play” was the thing I had not yet understood
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Lillie - Thanks for all your help and apologies for the barrage of posts as I work through this.
First - the issue I was having with renaming the multi-instrument player? That was my bad - I hadn’t set “Allow instrument changes”.
Next, I tried your option 2 - using Manually Staff Visibility with Hide Empty Staves. That is much easier than creating a multi-instrument player. But I’m not clear on why we still have the system dividers - I set this to 2 players - so I would not expect to see system dividers when only 1 player is present for a given system. Does this setting only work on a flow basis (i.e. based on the number of players assigned to a given flow?)
Edit: Answering my own question. Yes, in “Show system dividers”, the option “When minimum number of players present” IS on a flow by flow basis. I.e., it is based on #of players assigned to a given flow, not the # of staves visible in a system. This IS in the doc - and once you get the things properly sorted out it makes sense, but it is not intuitively obvious. It would help if the option read “When minimum # of flow players present” (or something along those lines).