Da Vinci Classics
Physical and Digital Release: 1 June 2018
Andrea Oliva and Anna Loro explore two centuries of French music for flute and harp, bringing the instruments' distinctive colours into an intimate chamber dialogue.
13.67€
Un rêve long deux siècles · 16 tracks
Timings refer to the digital edition; services may round individual tracks differently.
Andrea Oliva was born in Modena in 1977. He graduated with honours from the Vecchi–Tonelli music institute in Modena after five years of study with G. Betti, and continued his training with C. Montafia, G. Cambursano, Jean-Claude Gérard and Sir James Galway. Galway described him as one of the finest flautists of his generation and a shining star in the flute world. His international competition successes include first prize at the Kobe International Flute Competition in 2005—the first Italian to receive this award—and third prize at the ARD International Music Competition in Munich in 2004.
His concert activity has taken him to major venues worldwide, including Carnegie Hall in New York, a London appearance in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II, Tokyo Bunka Kaikan and the Hong Kong Academy, as well as Chile and Cuba. A former member of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and the Herbert von Karajan Academy, he was invited to perform as guest principal flute with the Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 23. Conductors with whom he has worked include Claudio Abbado, Lorin Maazel, Valery Gergiev, Sakari Oramo, Mariss Jansons and Bernard Haitink. Abbado personally invited him to play with Orchestra Mozart in Bologna, where he also taught at the orchestra’s academy.
From 2001 to 2003, he was principal flute at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma. His orchestral collaborations include the Bayerischer Rundfunk orchestra, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Bamberg Symphony, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra of Europe. With the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, he has appeared as a soloist under Christopher Hogwood, Myung-Whun Chung and Antonio Pappano, including a performance of Nielsen’s Flute Concerto in March 2010 broadcast on RAI Radio 3. In 2012, he gave the Italian premiere of Marc-André Dalbavie’s Flute Concerto under Manfred Honeck.
His chamber groups include GlobeDuo with guitarist C. Savarese, the Quintetto di Fiati Italiano, the wind quintet of musicians from Santa Cecilia and the Concertgebouw, and I Cameristi di Santa Cecilia. GlobeDuo has explored new and less familiar repertoire for flute and guitar in Italy and abroad. As a soloist and teacher, he has been invited to flute festivals in China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Slovenia, Germany and Italy. His discography includes recordings for ARTS, Chant de Linos, VDM, Hyperion, Decca and Sony.
He has served as principal flute of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome since 2003. His teaching appointments have included the music university in Lugano, Switzerland, and a visiting professorship at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
Born in Desenzano del Garda, Italy, Anna Loro studied at the Verona Conservatoire with Mirella Vita and at the Académie de Gargilesse with Pierre Jamet. A prizewinner in national and international competitions, she began a career as a soloist while still very young and has collaborated with numerous chamber ensembles. Her recital appearances include the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Piccolo Regio in Turin, Teatro Regio in Parma, Società del Quartetto in Milan, Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Settembre Musica in Turin, Asolo Musica and the Musikverein in Vienna. She has also performed at festivals in Dresden, Salzburg, Istanbul, Gargilesse, Thessaloniki, Tokyo and Nagoya, at the European Harp Symposium in Amsterdam, and at the universities of Buenos Aires and San Juan.
Since 1976, she has appeared as a guest harpist with leading orchestras in Italy and abroad. She was principal harpist at the Arena di Verona from 1980 to 1990 and has played with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, the RAI Symphony Orchestra in Turin, the Hessischer Rundfunk orchestra in Frankfurt, the NDR orchestra in Hamburg and the Bayerischer Rundfunk orchestra in Munich. Conductors with whom she has worked include Claudio Abbado, Lorin Maazel, Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Donato Renzetti, Luciano Berio, Umberto Benedetti Michelangeli, Salvatore Accardo, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Alexander Lazarev, Eliahu Inbal, Georges Prêtre, Mariss Jansons and Neville Marriner.
She collaborated with the Carme chamber ensemble, performing Debussy’s Danses under Jean-Pierre Rampal, and recorded a duo album with violinist Anahi Carfi devoted to Donizetti, Spohr and Saint-Saëns. In 1998, she performed Mozart’s Concerto for flute, harp and orchestra, K. 299, with Patrick Gallois and the Lugano radio orchestra conducted by Alain Lombard. Her teaching work includes the Brescia Conservatoire and masterclasses in Italy and abroad, including Trinity Laban Conservatoire, the Guildhall School in London, Manchester, Zaragoza, Monte Carlo and Strasbourg.
Pierre Jamet praised her ability to move listeners through the charm of her sound and the musical intelligence of her interpretations, together with a powerful touch and an exceptionally secure technique.
Camille Saint-Saëns: (b Paris, 9 Oct 1835; d Algiers, 16 Dec 1921). French composer, pianist, organist and writer. Like Mozart, to whom he was often compared, he was a brilliant craftsman, versatile and prolific, who contributed to every genre of French music. He was one of the leaders of the French musical renaissance of the 1870s.
Eugène Bozza (b Nice, 4 April 1905; d Valenciennes, 28 Sept 1991). French composer and conductor. He studied with Büsser, Rabaud, Capet and Nadaud at the Paris Conservatoire where he won premiers prix for the violin (1924), conducting (1930) and composition (1934), and also the Prix de Rome with La légende de Roukmāni (1934). From 1938 to 1948 he conducted at the Opéra-Comique in Paris and in 1951 he was appointed director of the Ecole Nationale de Musique, Valenciennes, an appointment he held until his retirement in 1975. He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1956. Though his large-scale works have been successfully performed in France, his international reputation rests on his substantial output of chamber music for wind. This displays at a high level the qualities characteristic of mid-20th-century French chamber music: melodic fluency, elegance of structure and a consistently sensitive concern for instrumental capabilities.
François de Boisvallée was a pseudonym of the French composer Pierre Duclos (1929–1973), who also published under the name Stani Marinko. His output includes chamber and instrumental music as well as works in lighter musical genres.
His Sonata No. 1 for flute and harp, recorded by Andrea Oliva and Anna Loro, draws on Baroque and galant models. Its three movements—Allegro, Air tendre and Allegro giocoso—combine clear formal outlines with graceful melodic writing and the contrasting colours of the two instruments.
Gabriel Fauré: (b Pamiers, Ariège, 12 May 1845; d Paris, 4 Nov 1924). French composer, teacher, pianist and organist. The most advanced composer of his generation in France, he developed a personal style that had considerable influence on many early 20th-century composers. His harmonic and melodic innovations also affected the teaching of harmony for later generations.
Jean Cras (b Brest, 22 May, 1879; d Brest, 14 Sept 1932). French composer. The son of a distinguished naval surgeon, his gifts were nurtured in a musical home, but, following in the family tradition he enlisted at the naval academy in 1896. After settling in Paris in 1900, he met Duparc, who immediately recognized his gifts. Through three months of almost daily instruction during 1900, Duparc provided the only formal training in composition Cras received, an experience crucial to his development and to their life-long friendship; Duparc would later call Cras his ‘spiritual son’.
Cras had four children. His second daughter Colette, an excellent pianist, married Alexandre Tansman; she later premièred Cras's Piano Concerto (1931). Unlike his friend Roussel, Cras sustained a brilliant naval career all his life, rising to rear-admiral and receiving numerous decorations for heroism during World War I.
His works remained relatively unknown until his opera Polyphème won the First Prize in the ‘Concours musical de la Ville de Paris’ in 1921, and was produced at the Opéra-Comique in December 1922. From this time, his works were performed by leading interpreters and he was befriended by many of the most prominent musical, literary and political figures of the time. His death inspired hundreds of poignant eulogies and the commission of a monument overlooking the harbour at Brest.
Although naval obligations necessitated his absence from Paris for much of his life, Cras remained fully aware of artistic developments, but maintained a passionately creative independence. Schooled in the Beethovenian structural principles instilled in him by Duparc, he championed cyclic form and motivic development. From an initially Franckian idiom, Cras evolved an eclectic Impressionism, combining Celtic folk and sacred elements with exoticisms inspired by his travels. Cras composed 77 songs, giving primacy to the text and adapting his style to a generally restrained narrative tessitura. He first embraced symbolist poetry and, after setting Samain's Polyphème, his vocal compositions were the products of fruitful collaborations with living post-Parnassian poets whom he knew well. His legacy of chamber music is one of the century's finest and demonstrates an acutely sophisticated understanding of instrumentation and nuance.
A prodigious intellect steeped in the religious writings of Léon Bloy, Cras expressed his deep Catholic faith and introspective spirituality (often fiercely self-critical) through diaries and voluminous correspondence. Honoured by the French Academy of Science, Cras's patented inventions include his règle-rapporteur, a navigational ruler-compass still used by the French Navy. Only in the 1990s has his musical importance begun fully to emerge.
Jules Mouquet (1867–1946) was a French composer and teacher. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Théodore Dubois and Xavier Leroux and won the Prix de Rome in 1896 with the cantata Mélusine. He later received the Prix Trémont and Prix Chartier and taught harmony at the Paris Conservatoire from 1913.
His music combines late Romantic expression with an interest in instrumental colour. His best-known work, La flûte de Pan, Op. 15, has remained an important part of the flute repertoire and exists in versions for flute and piano and for flute and orchestra. He also wrote orchestral, vocal and chamber music.
Album Notes An aura of sensual mystery surrounds the myth of the flute’s birth and its creator, the god Pan. He fashioned the instrument from the reeds into which his beloved Syrinx had been transformed; stirred by the wind, they produced a delicate sound. Through the vital breath, the god’s grief becomes the flute’s enchanting timbre. The instrument retains something mysterious and primordial. Its ability to suggest the inexpressible, and its association with the sensuality of an archaic, non-European world, helped awaken French interest in its expressive possibilities at the…
An aura of sensual mystery surrounds the myth of the flute’s birth and its creator, the god Pan. He fashioned the instrument from the reeds into which his beloved Syrinx had been transformed; stirred by the wind, they produced a delicate sound. Through the vital breath, the god’s grief becomes the flute’s enchanting timbre. The instrument retains something mysterious and primordial. Its ability to suggest the inexpressible, and its association with the sensuality of an archaic, non-European world, helped awaken French interest in its expressive possibilities at the dawn of the twentieth century. The flute could embody the different impulses of that complex age. Fascinated by its timbre, many French composers explored its intimate inflections alongside the harp’s gentle sound, with results that are sometimes luminous and sometimes melancholy.
The programme presented by Andrea Oliva and Anna Loro explores French repertoire written specifically for flute and harp, together with transcriptions. It moves from celebrated composers to less familiar figures, revealing how widespread and firmly established the interest in this instrumental pairing became.
Jules Mouquet is one example. His music is rich in Romantic and Impressionist associations and explores instrumental colour without undermining its harmonic foundations. His attention to formal construction, both in detail and on a larger scale, gives the music clarity and coherence. The work chosen by the Oliva–Loro duo is among his best known and recalls the Greek god and his ancient instrument in its title: La flûte de Pan. This sonata exists in versions for different forces, with the flute remaining the principal voice. Two of its three movements are heard here: the playful Allegro Pan et les bergers and the Adagio Pan et les oiseaux. The flute’s bright, flowing colours and rapid flourishes suggest the wind’s breath, creating a peaceful pastoral setting without a melancholy undertone: a true locus amoenus.
The enigmatic François de Boisvallée, a pseudonym of Pierre Duclos, was drawn to musical techniques associated with the past. Baroque and galant styles become signs of a consoling world elsewhere. His agreeable music combines refined, mellow colours with a formal order that guides the listener away from the anxieties of the contemporary world. His Sonata No. 1 for flute and harp has three movements—Allegro, Air tendre and Allegro giocoso—and evokes galant atmospheres through graceful manners and pastel shades.
The former child prodigy Camille Saint-Saëns is represented by a transcription of the Fantaisie, Op. 124, originally written for violin and harp, with the flute taking the violin’s place. Composed in 1907 and dedicated to the Eissler sisters, both virtuoso musicians, the work encapsulates Saint-Saëns’s balanced yet luxuriant style. Its single movement unfolds in distinct sections shaped by the changing relationships between the two instruments. Musical ideas are stated, recalled, reiterated and emphasised in an intimate dialogue: flute and harp alternate in sensuous song, their lines interweaving in a wealth of tonal nuances. An attraction to exotic colour also informs Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix, the culminating passage of the love scene between Samson and Dalila in the opera composed between 1867 and 1876. Saint-Saëns turns this part of the dialogue into something resembling an aria, allowing Dalila’s voice to dominate and reveal the irresistible force of her seduction. In the transcription, the chromatic vocal line is entrusted to the flute. Its sensuality evokes the opposition between feminine desire and masculine reason, now defenceless—a familiar theme in late nineteenth-century art.
The naval officer Jean Cras was also captivated by the evocative atmosphere of distant worlds. Initially self-taught as a musician and composer, he received his only sustained formal training after meeting Henri Duparc. His profession kept him at sea for much of his life, far from the artistic ferment of early twentieth-century Paris. This encouraged a creative independence and eclecticism fundamental to his originality. Despite his isolation, Cras remained responsive to the spirit of his age, drawn to the archaic and primordial elements of his native Brittany and of the countries he visited. The sounds of the African balafon and the stories of the griots helped inspire the Suite en duo of 1927. Its four movements employ cyclic construction. This suite for flute and harp seeks to recreate the mystery of a distant world whose unfamiliar culture might appear ancestral to a Western visitor.
Eugène Joseph Bozza followed a more conventional path, studying at the conservatoire and graduating in violin, composition and conducting. Despite the regular progression of his career, he shared Cras’s remarkable eclecticism as a composer, writing in genres ranging from chamber and symphonic music to opera. The Deux impressions are transcriptions for flute and harp of the first and last pieces of the earlier Trois impressions, written in 1953 for flute and piano. In La Fontaine de la Villa Médicis, the arpeggiated figures of both instruments evoke the flowing water of the fountain at the Medici villa. In La Danse d’Elké, the flute settles into a lyrical melody with nostalgic inflections.
Mélodies were a constant in Gabriel Fauré’s output: precious musical miniatures often offered to close friends in the cultivated Parisian society of the fin de siècle. Après un rêve, Op. 7 No. 1, is dedicated to Marguerite Baugnies, one of his intimate confidantes and a source of comfort in moments of pain and doubt. The composer chooses deeply intimate tones for this romance, expressing confidence and tenderness without slipping into facile sentimentality. Another mélodie, Clair de lune, sets a poem by Paul Verlaine and is dedicated to Fauré’s friend, the painter Emmanuel Jadin. The composer found comfort in the sheltered world of the salons and wrote for the musicians and amateurs among his friends. His poetic language attends to the finest shades of intimacy, rather than the declamatory splendour of the great theatres. This delicacy is also present in the Berceuse from the Dolly Suite, Op. 56, dedicated to Dolly Bardac on her first birthday. This “little doll”, the daughter of Emma Bardac, née Moyse, with whom the composer had a relationship, is reflected in the graceful charm of a lullaby that recalls the sweetness of childhood.
Text by Silvia d’Anzelmo. Original English translation by Margaret Thompson; English revised against the Italian original.
Andrea Oliva, flute; Anna Loro, harp (Salvi, Apollo model, 2003). Recorded at Studio “I Musicanti”, Rome, October 2017. Producer, sound engineer and mastering: Giovanni Caruso. Musical supervision: Giovanni Caruso and Dario Paolini. Editing: Mattia Ometto.
Production, design and art direction: OMK–Da Vinci. Printed with the support of S.P.L.M. The copyright in this sound recording and artwork is owned by OMK–Da Vinci. ℗ and © OMK–Da Vinci Classics. DDD; manufactured in Japan.
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
Broadcasts, conversations and listening features dedicated to this recording.
Radio UNAM
An official Radio UNAM FM playlist identifies Un reve long deux siecles, performed by Andrea Oliva and Anna Loro. The broadcast date is not assigned here because the page contains conflicting month and day information.
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