Hugues Rediscovered

Out Now on Blue Seal Concept: HUGUES REDISCOVERED - Live World Premiere Recordings from the Lost Manuscripts

Recorded live in July 2025 at the Pescara Flute Festiva, Auditorium Aurum

Concept

For more than a century, Luigi Hugues has been regarded as an amateur composer: an accomplished flautist who, alongside his work as a geographer, wrote quality music for his own instrument and regularly committed it to print. A discovery made in Casale Monfer­rato in 2021 has overturned that image.

In 2001 I had compiled a first draft of the cata­logue of his compositions for the biographical volume edited by Claudio Paradiso and pub­lished by the Municipality of Casale Monfer­rato: 145 works with opus numbers, all published, and 51 manuscripts of sacred com­positions, formerly kept inside the organ of the Cathedral and now preserved at the Cathedral Chapter Archive. The picture seemed clear — Hugues had written mainly for flute, his own instrument, publishing everything and leaving unpublished only the sacred pieces tied to the liturgical service.

The discovery of Hugues’s music archive, by Bruno Raiteri, has overturned that picture. Alongside the published compositions, an al­most equivalent number have now emerged in manuscript form, as scores and individual parts in varying states of completeness. A clue was in fact already traceable in a review that ap­peared in Il Monferrato on 4 November 1871, dedicated to the Notturno per flauto e piano­forte op. 53, just published by Lucca (plate no. 20346): in its closing lines, the reviewer noted that “Hugues has many unpublished composi­tions: I hope to see them soon made available to lovers of good music — through publica­tion.”

Hugues had begun composing very young, around the age of twenty, for the pleasure of writing and to have original pieces to perform in concert with his brother Felice, himself an accomplished flautist. The collection brought to light by Raiteri reveals, alongside the sacred pieces, an instrumental corpus of considerable ambition, extending to ensembles that find no counterpart among the published works. Par­ticularly emblematic are the six Terzetti for three flutes — a genre cultivated between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then progressively fallen into disuse — alongside chamber works for strings alone and for strings and piano. It is a body of work whose variety and compositional substance in­vite us to see this composer with new eyes, recognising merits and abilities that are by now plain to see.

Bruno Raiteri did not stop at the discovery itself: together with Nicoletta Bonzano, he founded Edizioni Musicali Raiteri, with the aim of progressively publishing the manuscripts and making them available to performers wishing to add them to their repertoire.

From this work comes Hugues Rediscovered, which offers for the first time the recording of a focused selection of the pieces recently brought to light: an Étude, two character pieces for flute and piano — the Barcarola in D minor and the Bolero in E minor — and the first Ter­zetto in F-sharp minor.

Tracklist:

 Recorded live in July 2025 at the Pescara Flute Festiva, Auditorium Aurum

Artstic director: Marco Felicioni

Sound engineer: Fabio Fochesato

Mixing and mastering: Fabio Fochesato at Blue Seal Studio, Rome.

With thanks to:           Edizioni Musicali Raiteri

                                   Pianoforti Fabbrini

                                   Municipality of Pescara – Department of Culture

Produced by Fabio Fochesato for Blue Seal Concept

Management: Elsie Khairallah for DGMW

Design Ettore Festa, HaunagDesign

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