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The Magic Flute - The Andrea Oliva Story: Jack Buckley reports on an extraordinary young flautist, 9.3.2010 (JB)

Andrea Oliva

Of all life’s pleasures, the one which probably gives greatest satisfaction is when the ordinary unexpectedly turns out to be extraordinary, when the mundane enjoys an improbable visitation of the beatific. It’s hard to believe it’s happening. The first arrival at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok is like this. You are expecting a luxury hotel. You would not normally call a hotel an experience, whatever its grade. But this one you do. All expectations –as well as qualities you were not expecting- are surpassed.

For the past thirty years, I’ve taken part in the commission for the selection of the players within Italy for EUYO (European Union Youth Orchestra). Each year, there are some four hundred young hopefuls, covering all the orchestra’s instruments, and each of them with a diploma in their instrument as a qualification for entering the competition. Rome and Milan are the audition centres. In both cities, we are annually punished by an entire morning given over to mediocre flautists. They are light years below the standard we seek, also for OGI (the Orchestra Giovanile Italiano –the Italian national youth orchestra- ) who hold their auditions at the same time. But on a chilly Milan day in the autumn of 1997, a boy stepped into these auditions who dramatically stopped the show.

Piero Farulli (viola of the Quartetto Italiano) – never one to be effusive- had picked up the boy’s application form and told the rest of us that for his flute diploma, there was a mark of 10. (top mark in Italian conservatories) Farulli suggested to his colleagues that we sustain this mark and dictated a letter to his secretary (there present) to the head of the conservatory and the Ministry in Rome (which we all signed) pointing out the exceptional talent which was blooming in this player. In the meantime, he asked Andrea to play another movement of the Mercadante concerto just to be sure our ears were not deceiving us. And this time, for God’s sake put something of yourself into it – he mock snarled. Andrea didn’t disappoint.

That same year, the flautist entered the competition for the GMJO (Gustav Mahler Jungendorchester ) where unsurprisingly, he was also offered a place. So what was he to do? Accept a place studying and touring with Bernard Haitink (EUYO) or Claudio Abbado (GMJO) ? He chose the GMJO. That certainly turned out to be the right choice. The moment Abbado heard him, he enrolled him in the von Karajan Academy, whose tutors are the leading players of the Berlin Philharmonic –and whose pupils, in turn, are coached and encouraged to deputise for their maestros. Even after he left the Academy, he continued to be called as a guest with the Berlin orchestra. Belatedly, he got his chance to work with Haitink in Berlin. He is also principal flute and tutor in Abbado’s newly-formed Mozart orchestra as well as principal flute soloist in the orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

Andrea Oliva was born in Modena on 25 September 1977, the youngest of two sons, to a father who was passionately fond of Italian opera (a parallel with Pappano here). Andrea was sent to piano lessons, but in 1988, the piano teacher told him he was truly anti-musical and he should give up. He did, and head bowed, he decided he would wait till his voice settled into adulthood and then he would study singing and hope to fulfil his father’s greatest wishes. But then he turned out to have no real voice, so in 1991, I thought I’d better try something easy and took up the flute.

That soon proved to be the right choice. Oliva and his flute are not simply the partners of a perfect marriage, the world knows them as one. The boy made the flute part of himself and himself part of the flute. Did I tell you that Muramatsu in Tokyo have just finished making me a tailor-made instrument which takes into account all my performance characteristics? I played for them in Tokyo and left them recordings and the new baby has just arrived here! It takes months for them to make this precision instrument, not to mention putting me into bankruptcy! But that gives a new twist on the old Jewish quip –with friends like this, who needs enemies?

Of James Galway, Andrea says you should ignore all the discussions about possible shortcomings of his musicianship and just wallow in the unequalled joy he communicates through his performances: A big personality might sometimes override what the composer is after, but there is no one in the flute world who has such perfect technical command, who profoundly understands what happens to breath as it makes its way through this instrument.

During a spaghettato after her excellent Sermoneta recital in July 2009 (see review) Angela Hewitt told me she had heard a flautist, the likes of which had never been heard before. When she named him, I was not exactly surprised to learn that it was Andrea . She immediately arranged for a tour of USA and Canada with them both performing the Bach sonatas. Some of these recitals were also fund-raising events for Angela Hewitt’s Trasimeno Music Festival, held every summer in the lake-side resorts of that scenic part of Italy and where Angela has a house. Hyperion will record this duo playing the Bach sonatas and there will be a launching concert of the CD at the Wigmore Hall in February 2012.

The Santa Cecilia concert on Tuesday 9 March was telerecorded for future transmission by RAI. Antonio Pappano explained to the audience that he had begun his career as a conductor in Scandinavia and retained a special affection for their composers. I never think of Sibelius as a Scandinavian composer; he is too great to be confined to geographical boundaries; it would be like filing Mozart under Austrian composer. But Sibelius has never ever taken hold in Italy, the way he has in England or America, so Pappano’s championing of his music is welcome. The audience thought so too. They gave a deserved, rapturous ovation to the orchestra’s new, young cor anglais player, Simone Sommerhalder, who delivered admirably all the poetry of The Swan of Tuonela.

However, it seems to me that the music of Carl Nielsen should not be merely confined to Denmark, but to a rubbish dump. Not even with the magic flute of Oliva does his flute concerto work. Galway had forewarned Oliva that it is impossible to arrive at the audience with this piece. Of course, there were some magnificent Oliva sounds, but this is a piece which is so lacking in any real musical content, it makes a performer’s task impossible: a serious slip in musical taste, Maestro Pappano, for insisting on it. Nevertheless, the Rome public have such treasured memories of their flautist that they refused to let him go without an encore. Syrinx was sublime: daringly unadorned, simple, breathtakingly beautiful and pitched with razor-edged precision. The Santa Cecilia audience had got their flautist back.

Andrea took his place in the orchestra for the second part of the concert, which began with Smetana’s overture to The Bartered Bride. No Italian orchestra would be able to give you the biting string sound which this piece demands unless their conductor was Antonio Pappano: this could have been the Czech Philharmonic. Another occasion where Pappano has realized the impossible.

The magic flute was heard in some idyllic playing in the Dvorak cello concerto, which also had significant contributions from the first horn, Guglielmo Pellarin –a young man who has thoroughly understood what you can do with a horn. And this is an instrument for which Dvorak has great regard. These orchestral contributions were just as well since the soloist, Han-Na Chang, hacked away at the piece like a washerwoman trying to remove dirty notes that she didn’t approve of: Out! Out! Damned spot ! Yes, there was even some Lady Macbeth violence in her destructive scrubbing.

Chang is at the other end of the musical spectrum to Oliva. If I were asked to name Andrea Oliva’s chief qualities, elegance and eloquence would have to head the list. But there is more: he has such profound respect for every composer he plays, a kind of touching humility which is audible in his delivery. The conductor, Jan Latham Koenig, something of a specialist in Janacek, told me that in Mlady , the flute repeats a melody with one note difference, and that Oliva was the only flautist he had worked with who had unprompted, observed that difference. I still have the aural memory of the seductive sound of his 1997 audition performance of the E minor Mercadante concerto. And never did birds flutter so convincingly as his performance in Carnival of the Animals. The reality version of the magic flute.

Jack Buckley