Composer, clarinetist and author, Hélios Azoulay is an iconoclastic artist. His works explore the question of memory and more particularly that of the Shoah.
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Helios Azoulay is best known as a composer and clarinetist. Writing is also one of her areas of interest. He has just released a second book in which he tells the story of a Jewish musician from Prague imprisoned in a ghetto during World War II. A subject which also occupies the musical universe of the artist.
For the past ten years, Hélios Azoulay has been playing music composed in concentration camps on stage. In 2014, he brought together these pieces found in a disc entitled… even in Auschwitz. In his latest book Just before switching off, Hélios Azoulay wished, in a way, “give voice” to these Jewish musicians, victims of the Nazi extermination centers. The main character of Hélios Azoulay, locked in a ghetto, is deprived of his music, his scores. So he decides to write to survive this hell.
Jack of all trades, Hélios Azoulay also stages his texts. This is particularly the case for his first novel, released in 2020, Me too I lived, inspired by his childhood. An autobiography that he will perform again next spring at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, from March 30 to April 17, 2022. In this book, he looks back on his childhood in Nice. A modest life in a two-room apartment with his grandparents. Because his parents, drug addicts, are absent. “I too have lived! It’s a cry, I had to yell it” reports Hélios Azoulay. There too, the transmission of memory is omnipresent, but in an embellished way. “It is really the privilege of literature to be able to re-enchant the past” he concludes.