French Violist Aurélien Pétillot, founder and artistic director of VIOLA BY CHOICE has enjoyed a growing reputation as a versatile and engaging performer and teacher. He has given solo and chamber music performances throughout Europe and Northern America , on both modern and baroque Violas. He is the winner of the 1997 and 1998 City of Paris Chamber Music Competition , and of the 1998 City of Paris Viola Competition .

He holds a Bachelor’s in musicology and performance from the Sorbonne University of Paris, a Master’s from the Mannes College the New School for Music, in New York , and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin.

In Texas , Dr. Pétillot has been playing regularly with the Austin , San Antonio , Corpus Christi and Victoria symphony orchestras.

An avid promoter of chamber music, an ardent champion of music old and new, and a sincere believer in Music as an accessible and universal life changing energy, Dr. Pétillot has been a faculty artist with the Austin Chamber Music Center since 2000. He has also 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. Commercial recordings of Prokofiev’s Quintet, and of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht are to be released in 2007. His lecture/recital entitled Death Symbolism as Creative Hallmark in Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata, has been presented in various universities in America and in France as part of the commemorations celebrating the 100^th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth.  

Viola in Austin