Julia Pilant

Julia Pilant is the Assistant Principal Horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and a horn instructor at Bard College. Before joining the Met, she was Principal Horn with the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra for ten years. She then returned to New York City where she performed frequently with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, New York City Ballet, New York City Opera, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, American Symphony Orchestra, the Stamford Symphony, and various Broadway shows. In addition, she has played principal horn for the Saito Kinen and Tokyo Opera Nomori music festivals and the Mito Chamber Orchestra in Japan under music director Seiji Ozawa. She has also been a guest artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as a participant in the Classical Tahoe, Affinis (Nagaoka, Japan), Santa Fe, Mainly Mozart, La Jolla Music Society SummerFest, Steamboat Strings, Festivale di Due Mondi (Spoleto, Italy), Bard, and OK Mozart music festivals. In 1994 she won the American Horn Competition. As an equally enthusiastic music educator, she has given several master classes in schools and festivals across the country including the Juilliard School, Interlochen Arts Camp, and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. Pilant received her bachelor’s degree from the Eastman School of Music as a student of Verne Reynolds, and her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Juilliard School where she studied with Julie Landsman.