Luigi Hugues (1836-1913)

Among the most interesting personalities needing to be rediscovered in the musical world of late-nineteenth-century Italy, a very distinctive one is undoubtedly the Piedmontese composer Pietro Eugenio Luigi Hugues (Casale Monferrato, 27 October 1836 – 5 March 1913). The available information about Hugues is no longer as scanty as it used to be. Thanks to the data obtained by archive researches, Hugues has been revealed as an unexpected figure: he was not only a renowned flutist, organist and composer, but also an important geographer, a university professor, and one of the main supporters of the study of geography in Italian schools. His life shows surprising similarities with that of a contemporary of his, the flutist-composer-chemist Aleksandr Borodin (1833-1887). So this recording is quite precious. In the first place, because of its monographic character (it is the first disc entirely devoted to Luigi Hugues); secondly, for the exclusive performance of original works such as Sonata in C major op. 119, Studio da Concerto in D minor op. 3, Sonata Romantica op. 57, Capriccio “Le Silfidi” op. 29 no. 2, Sonata Fantastica op. 100, “Dans le Bois” op. 67 and, lastly, Sonata in Fa Op. 95: a masterly selection among the best original works of Hugues’s vast production of flute pieces (which is even more vast after the recent discoveries). These works are essential for understanding the deep soul, the truest nature of this composer.