Friends, Music, movies, museums, languages, people, creativity, chamber music, chamber music parties, concerts to play in or to listen to, food, chocolate, berries, grapes, Mom's risotto, Mom's couscous, French cheeses, Pain au raisins, prosciutto, pâtés, chips Ahoy, Travels, Paris, New York, San Francisco, interraction, complicity...
Music
I have very ecclectic tastes, from Adam De la Halle, to the Hamster dance. Bach, Brahms, Bartok, Shostakovich, Taraf de Haidouks, Osvaldo Golijov, Anatole Stefanet, Yuri Bashmet, Ella, Etta, Kronos Quartet, Jaqueline Du Pré, Maxim Vengerov, Gidon Kremer, Gilles Apap, David Box, Charlie Parker, Debussy, Philip Glass, Aretha Franklin, Cecilia Bartoli, Carlos Kleiber, Bobby Mc Ferrin, Glenn Gould, Brel, Brassens, Piazzola, Django Reinhardt, James Brown, John Coltrane, Tom Waits, Singing in the Rain, Stravinsky, Billie Holiday, Britten, Ysaÿe, Laurent Korcia, Edgar Meyer, Marian Anderson, Blues Brothers, Jordi Savall, John Elliott Gardiner, Bjork, George Crumb, Dan Welcher, Divahn, White Ghost Shivers, Elvis Costello, Buena Vista Social Club, Carlos Puebla, Norah Jones, Tallis, Purcell, Bluegrass, Hindemith, Maria Callas, Tosca String Quartet, Miro String Quartet, Alban Berg String Quartet, Berlioz, Bernard Hermann, Garth Knox...
Movies
Underground (Kusturica); Latcho Drom (Tony Gatlif); To be or not to be (Lubitsch); Singing in the Rain; Divorzio all'Italiana; Amélie; Airplane; Dead Men don't wear plaid; Indiana Jones; North by Northwest; Fellini Roma; Ocean's 11; Ocean's 12; Office Space; 2001 Space odyssey; L'auberge Espagnole; Jules et Jim; Shock Corridor; Requiem for a dream; The Money Pit; Night at the Opera; Duck soup; Dead Man; Dolce Vita; La Ricotta; Mean Streets, Ghost Dog; Mistery Train; Fishing with John; Big Lebowsky; Kind Hearts and Coronets;32 short films about Glenn Gould; Paths of glory; Delicatessen; East of Eden; Bringing up Baby; Blues Brothers; Zelig; Love and Death; The Silence (Bergman); West Side Story; Le père Noël est une ordure; Titus; Taming of the Shrew; Alexander Nevsky; The cabinet of Doctor Caligari; Dead Again; To have and Have not; Big deal on Madonna Street; Contempt; Crash; Brazil; Ran; Lust for life; Koyanisqatsi trilogy; Buena Vista Social Club; Caravaggio (Jarman); Le cercle Rouge; Pierrot le Fou; Breathless; Pulp Fiction; Laura; Seven; And Justice for all; Spellbound; Frida; Lost in Translation; Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are dead; This is Spinal Tap; Road to perdition; Streetcar named desire; Viva Maria; Victor Victoria; The Passion of Joan od Arc (Dreyer); Beauty and the Beast (cocteau); The night of the Iguana; 12 Angry men; Broken Flowers; Some like it hot; Red violin; La grande vadrouille; Young Frankenstein.
Television
MacGyver; Twin Peaks, The West Wing; Inside the Actor's studio; CSI New York; Iron Chef; Daily Show; Columbo; Nova; Sherlock Holmes (as portrayed by Jeremy Brett)
Books
All time favorites: The Trial, by Kafka; The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster; Les Plaisirs et les Jours, by Proust; Capitale de la douleur, by Paul Eluard; The journey is the destination-The journals of Dan Eldon, by Dan Eldon.
The recent reads that have marked/influenced/stimulated/excited me: Color by Victoria Finlay; Articles of impeachment against George W. Bush, by the Center for Constitutional Rights; Poetry by Anne Sexton; Poetry by Anna Akhmatova; Tidying up Art, by Ursus Wehrli;
And always:Shostakovitch, a life remembered, by Elizabeth Wilson; Le dernier Jour d'un condamné, by Victor Hugo; Exercices de style, by Raymond Queneau; Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, By Byron; Les fleurs du mal, Baudelaire; Les Chants de Maldoror, Lautréamont; Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde; I'm a stranger here myself, Bill Bryson; Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Hofstadter; Without Feathers, Woody Allen; As I Lay dying, Faulkner;
Mannes College Of Music
New York,New York
Graduated: 2000
Student status: Alumni
Degree: Master's Degree
Major: Music/Viola performance
1998 to 2000
UNIVERSITE PARIS IV SORBONNE
PARIS, France
Graduated: N/A
Student status: Alumni
Degree: Bachelor's Degree
Major: Musicology/Performance
Minor: Art History
About me:
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.
Who I'd like to meet:
Aurelien Petillot, Violist's Friend Space (Top 20)
Hi, Thanks for being our friend! If you're not busy this Saturday, July 11th, join us at the Hole in the Wall for a night of music! The show starts at 10pm, followed by an after party that will be announced at the show! If you're interested in the party, rsvp at:
May your wonderful week be filled with brightest Blessings, Love & Beauty! Namaste!
"The forest was in deep meditation under the darkness of mysteriously immense silence. Form, and yet formless, things appeared indescribably enlightened, as one interpenetrated into the state of neither perception nor non-perception, neither enlightenment nor non-enlightenment. Absolute freedom is to be free from the known, the dualism. This freedom is the ecstasy of meditation, which is the observation of world existential phenomena at every moment." Rexsy Rexsy.com
Thank you Aurelien for accepting us within your friends!
You are most welcome to be amongst ours!
All the very best to you in Life and in Music!
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