French Violist Aur?lien P?tillot 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 and takes great pride and joy in discovering and sharing the color possibilities the versatility and the richness of the instrument as well as the breadth scope and quality of its glorious and stimulating repertoire.
In 1998he 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. P?tillot 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.
Another professional goal is to create a chamber music society and summer festival devoted to outreach and education. He 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. By sharing his passion for music with all through viola and chamber music as well as through his teaching he hopes to welcome and unite all to Music.
Dr. P?tillot has been a faculty artist with the Austin Chamber Music Center since 2000. He also teaches at the Orpheus Academy of Music and maintains a successful private studio. 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 as well as local composers. Upcoming engagements include guest soloist appearances in the first seasons of the new music ensemble Sound Inversions and of the American Repertory Ensemble. Recently he produced a thesis and presented a lecture/recital both entitled Death Symbolism as Creative Hallmark in Shostakovich's Viola Sonata which will tour in various universities in America and in France as part of the commemorations celebrating the 1
