Alexandre Souillart & Matthieu Acar
Biography Alexandre Souillart & Matthieu Acar
Alexandre Souillart
has been invited to perform in numerous festivals in Europe, Asia and Latin America: Musica, 29th Japan Saxophone Festival, Taiwan, Thailand, Lima Contemporary Music Festival (Peru), Argentina and Colombia. In Paris, he gave a recital at the Musée d’Orsay Auditorium and played as a soloist at the Cité de la Musique in Henri Tomasi’s concerto for saxophone and orchestra, conducted by Graziella Contratto.
Alexandre Souillart studied at the Paris Conservatoire in Claude Delangle’s saxophone class (Master Degree and Soloist Diploma), chamber music with Laszlo Hadady (Master Degree) and free improvisation with Alexandros Markeas and Vincent Lê Quang. Concerts in France and abroad have served to further establish his musical personality.
Deeply engaged in contemporary music, Alexandre Souillart actively collaborates with several composers. His first CD features new works for tenor saxophone with various configurations. Frédéric Durieux’s Übersicht II for solo tenor saxophone (dedicated to A. Souillart), and Philippe Leroux’s Un Lieu Verdoyant for voice and saxophone are world premiere recordings.
Highly sought as an orchestral saxophonist, he played Berio’s Sinfonia with the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Jonathan Nott (2011), and has performed with the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris as well as the Ensemble Itinéraire.
Dedicated chamber musician, Alexandre Souillart founded a duo with the pianist Matthieu Acar. The duo actively seeks to enlarge the repertoire for saxophone and piano and has encouraged several composers to write works for it. Atyopsis has performed in France, Italy, Great Britain, Greece, Peru and Colombia and was invited at the Automn Festival of the Palazzetto Bru Zane (Venice) where it gave its historical overview program “From Berlioz to Debussy”.
Alexandre Souillart is a member of the Osmose Saxophone Quartet,, specialized in new music and in saxophone pedagogy. The group has appeared throughout Europe, from the Balkans to Great Britain, and has been invited to perform and give conferences in Taiwan. Osmose Saxophone Quartet recently performed Glazounov’s Saxophone Quartet at the Salle Pleyel and gave a premiere of their new pedagogical program “Four for Tango” at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.
Alexandre Souillart teaches at the Clamart Conservatoire-CRD (Paris), as well as at the Bretagne International Saxophone Academy which he founded in 2012. He has given numerous master classes in Europa, Asia and Latin America.
Alexandre Souillart is supported by the Meyer Foundation, the Société Générale bank and the Tarrazzi Funds. In 2010, he was a laureate of the Oriolis-Kriegelstein Foundation.
Alexandre Souillart is a Henri Selmer-Paris and Vandoren artist.
Matthieu Acar
An eclectic musician who is equally at home as a soloist and chamber musician, Matthieu Acar is perpetually seeking new ways to connect different repertoires and styles. An ardent defender of the music of our time, he delights in sharing original and often surprising programmes with his audiences. Curious and open-minded, Matthieu enthusiastically performs new works involving electronics and quarter-tone piano, to mention but a few…
Following Master’s degrees in piano and chamber music at the Paris Conservatoire, it was only natural that he continue there in the Artist Diploma course dedicated to Contemporary Repertoire and Creation. Grand prize winner of the Boulogne-Billancourt’s 2013 “Music of the Last Century” Competition, he was awarded the André Jolivet and Ricardo Viñes prizes at the Orléans International Piano Competition. A dedicated teacher, he is currently a professor at the Boulogne-Billancourt Conservatoire.
The Atyopsis Duo, which he founded with saxophonist Alexandre Souillart, won the grand prize at Milan’s Societa Umanitaria’s Competition and has since performed in Peru and Taiwan. The duo was instrumental in founding the InSoliTus Ensemble with the conductor Javier Gonzales Novales and composer Nicolas Mondon, whose works Matthieu often premieres.
