Music for Flute and Harp in Nineteenth-Century Italy

During the first half of the nineteenth century, when a successful new opera appeared on the scene, the publishing system promoted initiatives that aimed at maximising its diffusion and creating widespread channels for the exploitation of its popularity.
This was helped on by the production of paraphrases, duets and melodies; all these pieces were near-faithful transcriptions of their models, but were enlarged and personalised through the keyboard of a piano or, as in this case, the strings of a harp or the “keys” of a flute.
We undoubtedly should add to all this that a typically bourgeois taste led proficient “amateurs” to take pleasure in delightfully playing all sorts of musical instruments and performing, among other things, an original repertoire that was not bound to opera music but influenced by it.
Claudio Ortensi’s flute and Anna Pasetti’s harp take this world back to us through this premiere recording of the works by Michelangelo Sola, Giovanni Toja, Angelo Bovio and Giuseppe Gariboldi, active protagonists of the European and Italian compositional streams converging chamber music with the political and cultural trends that crossed the Classicism and the Romanticism.