Aurelien Petillot, Violist

Join Violist AURELIEN PETILLOT, pianist NIKKI BIRDSONG, and friends, and enjoy the last concert of the very successful and eclectic inaugural season of the chamber music concert series, VIOLA BY CHOICE.
Embrace our cultural diversity and reaffirm our shared humanity as you discover folk and World inspired Classical Music from Argentina, Azerbaijan, China, England, France, Italy, Iran, Poland, Puerto-Rico, the United-States, Spain, & Romania. The concert will include celebrated works by PIAZZOLA, RAVEL, and VAUGHAN-WILLIAMS. It will also feature LUCIANO BERIO's masterpiece, the FOLK SONGS, with mezzo-soprano ELIZABETH PETILLOT, and the world premiere of a new work by Austin's own, JONATHAN KOLM.
Friday and Saturday, May 2nd and 3rd, 8PM
Christ Chapel-Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest
606 Rathervue Place (31st Street and Duval), Austin, TX 78705
French Violist Aurélien Pétillot has enjoyed a growing reputation as a versatile and engaging performer and teacher. Creative, energetic, and involved music making are at the core of what he does. He has given solo and chamber music performances throughout Europe and North America, on both modern and baroque Violas.
In 1998,he won the City of Paris Viola Competition, as well as the City of Paris Chamber Music Competition for the second year in a row; he received his Bachelors in performance from the Ecole Nationale de Musique de Gennevilliers while studying with Jean-Claude Bouveresse and Pierre-Henri Xuereb, and his Bachelors in musicology from the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he was intently focused on correlations between visual arts and music, for example exploring parallels between Goya and Beethoven, or Hopper and Schubert. The same year, he was also offered a full scholarship to study with Caroline Levine at the Mannes College the New School for Music, in New York. In 2000, with a Masters in performance in hand, he accepted the Marguerite Fairchild Endowed Presidential Scholarship and a teaching assistantship, and went to study with Roger Myers, and later with John Largess, at The University of Texas at Austin, which conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in May 2005.
In Texas, Dr. Pétillot has been playing regularly with the Austin Symphony, the Victoria Bach Festival Orchestra, the Corpus Christi Symphony and Ballet Orchestras, as well as the Victoria Symphony Orchestra. Chamber music has been a very important and fulfilling part of his life since he was twelve, and it is his area of predilection as a performer. Commercial recordings of the Prokofiev Quintet, and of the complete chamber music works with viola by Loeffler are now respectively in post-production, and in preparation. His next recording projects will center around viola works by American women composers, and by French composers.
Dr. Pétillot is the founder and artistic director of the chamber music organization VIOLA BY CHOICE, which seeks to showcase the originality, versatility and importance of the viola, as well as the the breadth and scope of its glorious and stimulating repertoire through engaging, accessible, and bonding chamber music performances by the foremost local and visiting musicians. VIOLA BY CHOICE wishes to foster sincere and lasting cultural and personal exchanges with as diverse and broad an audience as it can reach and touch, within and beyond Austin’s vibrant community, whether in traditional concert halls or in schools, hospitals, museums, prisons and other venues. The viola is the perfect symbol of irresistible, boundless beauty too often concealed. As such it is the hope of Viola by Choice that it will encourage all to awaken, embrace, and share their inner viola, while reconnecting with each other and to Music. Dr. Pétillot considers Music to be an accessible and universal life changing energy, as well as one of the richest forms of human expression and creativity, and sincerely believes that it is the birthright of the human brotherhood to have access to it.
Dr. Pétillot has been a faculty artist with the Austin Chamber Music Center since 2000. He also has taught at the Orpheus Academy of Music and maintains a successful private studio. He is now faculty at the University of Mary-Hardin Baylor. He has helped his students blossom into self-confident, self-reliant, intellectually independent musicians, citizens and human beings while guiding them into making choices that are musically, historically, and stylistically informed.
Equally important has been his attachment to New Music. Through the Mannes and the UT new music ensembles he worked in close relationship with composers Samuel Adler, William Bolcom, Martin Bresnick, John Corigliano, Stephen Hartke, Lowell Liebermann, Kathryn Mischell, Augusta Read-Thomas, Christopher Theophanidis, Michael Torke, Dan Welcher, and others. He has also championed numerous works by UT composition faculty and students, and enjoyed fruitful and repeated collaborations with local composers Rob Deemer , P.Kellach Waddle , and Graham Reynolds .
Recent engagements have included guest soloist appearances with the new music ensemble Sound Inversions, the American Repertory Ensemble , and the Santa Fe Desert Chorale. His lecture/recital entitled Death Symbolism as Creative Hallmark in Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata, based on his doctoral thesis has been presented in various universities in America and in France as part of the commemorations celebrating the 100th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth. But Aurélien's greatest achievement has been to find somebody crazy enough to accept to marry him. Her name is Elizabeth and she is a wonderful mezzo-soprano.