Michel Petrossian – Compositeur

Saturday 27 June 2026

Callas — Creation Chanter Paradjanov, as part of the Festival Chants Libres, Fondation Bettencourt Schueller

Interpreters : Musicatreize
Direction : Roland Hayrabedian

Saturday 18 May 2024

Creation of the Vénus de Lespugue

"Venus de Lespugue" for solo viola.

Commissioned by the Calliopée Ensemble.

World Premiere: Karine Lethiec.

Published by Artchipel Music Editions.

May 18, 2024, at 9 p.m. at the Musée de l'Homme, as part of the Night of Museums.

"Venus de Lespugue" is inspired by the eponymous 15-centimetre mammoth bone statuette, found in 1922 in a cave in the Haute-Garonne region of France and dating back 29,000 years. It's one of the most fascinating objects of prehistoric times, and the emblem of the Musée de l'Homme, where it's on display.

The ambiguity of its multiple figure is superimposed on its obvious beauty, with multiple angles of view offering several interpretations: a single woman or two, one giving birth to the other, or a female figurine and phallic attribute, to evoke the completeness of fertility. However you read it, it seems to have a ritual function associated with it, celebrating life in its recommencement and continuity.

I wanted to be as close to the object of my inspiration as possible - so that I could fly as far as it carried me. I oscillated between metaphysical quest and aesthetic wonder, the transposition of sculptural proportions into music and very direct naturalism.

The work begins with a movement that recalls the story of its discovery.
The noisy rubbing of the bow on the diagonal evokes the rubbing of the ground during the excavations, and the percussive sound produced simultaneously by the left hand recalls the pickaxe blows that uncovered this Venus while disfiguring it (nine in number, referring to the nine dislocated pieces of the statuette during the discovery).

To attempt a poetic deciphering, I appropriated the viola's idiom, aiming to create a work-world that declines the instrument in all its avatars, but guided by what appears to me to be its very essence - inner song.

This song is made up of pure sounds or complex noises, fragments of melody or strident rhythms. Obsessed by the figure of the circle that commands all the object's structural proportions, I use the instrument's strings or wood - notably in bariolages that incorporate not only the strings, but also the ribs, as if to evoke the hypertrophied feminine attributes of this Venus that are partly missing.

A play of disjointed harmonic tones is a possible echo of the primitive flutes that were played in her time - they take us out of the limiting artifice of equal temperament.
An archaic chant that is at the same time a dance structures the second part of the work, and demands particular agility from the violist, through the accumulative effect of the multiplication of voices - a tribute to the plurality of readings, before the elements already heard return, in a more concentrated and elliptical form.

My "Venus de Lespugue" is above all a tribute to the extraordinary longevity of the object and the permanence of its beauty through the centuries. Permuting the functions of time and space, I wanted to verticalize this vertiginous duration and respond in echo to the silence of millennia, for if Venus de Lespugue was contemporary with all the events of history that we know, she lived double the periods of which we know nothing.

Programme artistique de la Nuit des Musées

Wednesday 14 June 2023

Five stars in Classical Music (BBC Music Magazine) for the CD "Armenian Cello Concertos"

Five stars in Classical Music (BBC Music Magazine) and reviewed by Michael Church, one of the leading British music critics (The Times, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Guardian).

https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/concerto/armenian-cello-concertos/