Bologna, Italy based American composer and pianist David Salvage releases Dreams of Love and Travel, works he composed for solo piano that engage with journeys physical, literary, and symbolic. A seven movement suite inspired by Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time occupies a central role in the collection, representing the large structural gesture on the album as it is surrounded by shorter character pieces.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 57:03 | ||
| 01 | The Crossing Bell at Genga Stazione | The Crossing Bell at Genga Stazione | 4:39 |
| 02 | Larici | Larici | 3:01 |
| 03 | Raffiche | Raffiche | 1:11 |
Moments from Proust (part one) |
|||
| 04 | I. Dreams of Travel and Love | I. Dreams of Travel and Love | 3:09 |
| 05 | II. The Restaurant at Rivebelle | II. The Restaurant at Rivebelle | 2:03 |
| 06 | III. Saint Loup’s Watch | III. Saint Loup’s Watch | 3:04 |
| 07 | IV. The Baron Laughs and Françoise Starts Again | IV. The Baron Laughs and Françoise Starts Again | 4:03 |
| 08 | Latemar Dream | Latemar Dream | 2:00 |
| 09 | 1610AM, Sailor’s Creek, Virginia | 1610AM, Sailor’s Creek, Virginia | 2:44 |
| 10 | Barcarole (Im Spreewald) | Barcarole (Im Spreewald) | 5:03 |
| 11 | Momentary Raptures | Momentary Raptures | 2:19 |
Moments from Proust (part two) |
|||
| 12 | V. Mon chéri Marcel | V. Mon chéri Marcel | 4:28 |
| 13 | VI-VII. O sole mio – Time Regained (The Garden Bell) | VI-VII. O sole mio – Time Regained (The Garden Bell) | 9:08 |
| 14 | Two Draughts from Lago Lambin | Two Draughts from Lago Lambin | 4:16 |
| 15 | Rientry | Rientry | 5:55 |
Part musical travelogue, part extended suite of stand alone and multi-movement works, composer and pianist David Salvage’s Dreams of Love and Travel extends upon the tradition of the solo piano character piece notably codified by Schumann, Brahms, Debussy, and Grieg. Salvage is American born but has lived in Bologna, Italy for the last several years. In the compositions featured on this album he turns his focus to destinations mostly within Europe (with a brief nod to his home state of Virginia), but also to internal journeys through the rich literary world of Proust. Salvage’s subtly ironic references to an aristocratic lineage associated both with the piano character piece as well as the Central European tradition show hints of his expatriate perspective.
The Crossing Bell at Genga Stazione paints a bucolic scene of a mountain train station in the Apennines with steady moto perpetuo quintuplets that alternate between block chords, a flowing melody, and swooping arpeggiated figures. The gentle undulation of Larici is inspired by a forest of conifers in the Western Alps, with light filtering delicately through the pines as they move in the breeze. The short Raffiche (“Gusts) accumulates energy as a moderate blast of wind might at a high altitude, with a rolling bass figure supporting an emerging melody of block chords and octaves in the top line.
The swells in Raffiche make for a smooth transition into the restless material that opens the seven movement suite, Moments from Proust. Inspired by Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Salvage maps musical motifs onto the yearnings and self-conceptions of the protagonist Marcel. “Dreams of Travel and Love” balances Marcel’s youthful enthusiasm, captured by the initial Lisztian gesture, with reflective chordal commentary. A wry waltz provides the foundation for the second movement, “The Restaurant at Rivebelle,” a portrait of an proper Central European eating establishment through the eyes of a curious adolescent. The ticking of a watch is the idle fixation of “Saint Loup’s Watch;” the piece focuses on the internal dialogue behind the search for the source of the irritant, before revealing the innocuous repeated tick at the end of the movement with one repeated note. In “The Baron Laughs and Françoise Starts Again,” an aristocrat’s smug chuckle is captured by quickly alternating block chords, rumbling bass figures, and playful grace notes, while a sheepish housekeeper Françoise’s speaking patters are evoked through an rangy, dotted rhythm. Separated from the rest of the suite later in the recording’s program, the final three movements of the suite are presented in two tracks, the second of which elides two sections with an attacca transition. “Mon chéri Marcel” marries Chopin-esque rubato with Debussyian washes of harmonic color, capturing a touching moment between lovers Marcel and Albertine. Poignant, lilting chords open “O sole mio” as Marcel’s sense of alienation and malaise leaves him lingering behind as his mother heads to the train station for their trip to Venice. He hears street musicians singing the staple Neopolitan song, which Salvage sets with dramatic flair, and snaps out of his stupor to join her before the imminent departure. Salvage reprises the virtuosic flourishes from the opening movement in “Time Regained (The Garden Bell)”, as the narrative circles back to Marcel’s youth and closes with a gentle reverie.
Latemar Dream belongs to the travelogue side of the album, a depiction of the summit of the mountain in the Dolomites featuring widely spread voices moving in ethereal contrary motion. 1610AM, Sailor’s Creek, Virginia is Salvage’s only glance back at the Americas in this collection, brooding snippets of the Battle Hymn of the Republic filtered through an oscillating two note figure in the middle range that captures the obscuring white noise of radio static. Barcarolle (Im Spreewald) takes us down Greater Berlin’s bucolic network of rivers that emerge from the Spree with lilting, watery figures that grow in grandeur, occasionally hinting at the complex history of the region beneath the charming surface with ominous bass passages underneath restless octave trills. Two Draughts from Lago Lambin portrays drinking from a mountain lake in the Dolomites with a gentle accompanimental figure that evokes the lapping of a tranquil wake, with intermittent ascending right hand stepwise figures shimmering in the reflection. Momentary Raptures does not specify its place of inspiration, instead its expansive voicings and brief pauses conjure the contemplation of travel itself, a fleeting mix of freedom and reflection of where one has been and where one is going, and where one belongs, both in embodied and spiritual ways. The ambivalence at losing that sense of freedom that greets many travelers upon their return home is the inspiration behind the restless Rientry, with a persistent alternation between groupings of five and four repeated notes contributing to its shifting foundation.
Artists often seem to geolocate themselves with their stylistic choices, adopting the aesthetic values of where they reside. David Salvage’s personal journey as an American composer living in Northern Italy and with access to all the destinations in nearby Central Europe seems to have cultivated, either intentionally or by happenstance, a unique perspective on the European compositional tradition. Writing firmly within a tradition of programmatic, evocative character pieces, Salvage nevertheless has sufficient distance to lightly tweak some of their features, blending a reverence for the overall expressive ethos while sprinkling in subtle tinges of an outsider’s voice.
– Dan Lippel
Recorded August 1-3, 2024 at Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, NY
Recording engineer and session producer: Ryan Streber
Editing, mixing, and mastering: Ryan Streber
Editing assistant: Deanna Fielding
Liner notes: David Salvage
Portions of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust translated by Lydia Davis and published by Penguin Books, 2002, are reprinted by permission of the publisher
Cover image: Portrait of La stazione di Genga-San Vittore Terme
Design: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Music publisher: Universal Edition, Vienna
David Salvage (b.1978) is an American composer and pianist living in Bologna, Italy. Born into a family of non-musicians, at age four he asked his parents for a piano, a wish that was granted on the condition that he take lessons for five years. Instead, he took them for fifteen years, along the way developing an interest in composition, winning local and national competitions as a pianist and composer, becoming one of the first pianists selected for the prestigious Perlman Music Program, and winning a scholarship to Harvard University, where he shifted his focus to composition. He continued his studies at Manhattan School of Music and the City University of New York, earned his PhD with a dissertation on György Kurtàg, and went into academia full-time, teaching music theory and history. A life-long Europhile, when the opportunity arose to live abroad, he took it, and now he is a dual citizen of Italy and the United States. He has been commissioned to write for orchestra, film, choir, and ensembles of all kinds and has received over a hundred performances at venues ranging from the Juilliard School in New York to the British Institute of Florence and the Minobu Town Center in Minobu, Japan. His music is published by Universal Edition, Vienna, and has been recorded on Deux-Elles and Navona Records. His most recent commission was a new work for the world-famous ocarina player Fabio Galliani. In Bologna, Salvage sings tenor in the Cappella Musicale di San Petronio and gives concerts with trumpeter Marco Trebbi (Duo Himmel). He is married with three children.
https://www.universaledition.com/en/Contacts/David-Salvage/Pianist/composer David Salvage flavors his new album, Dreams of Love and Travel, with ingredients from modernism, jazz, the Lisztian Romantic, and even American-Songbook pop. But these intentionally evocative solo piano pieces create a distinctive world.
The quintile time signature of the opening track and the unrhythmic second help bring the listener immediately into that richly emotional yet quirky world.
The roots of the pieces come from travels, mostly in Europe, and from reading Marcel Proust, whose work has inspired more than one composer. A wait for a train in the Apennines inspired the opening track (no pun intended). The cover art vividly depicts the scene, but devoid of human figures, perhaps reflecting the music’s purely instrumental nature. The piano is the voice.
Salvage’s compositions have an extremely communicative quality, quite apart from what they are meant to specifically depict. It sounds like a person is talking directly to you through the notes, even when the music is disembodied as on a recording.
The second and third tracks depict, respectively, a forest and high-altitude winds. You can easily imagine the waving of leafy branches in the mingling of consonant chords with dissonant punches, and then the wind as it moves from murmur to whistle and back.
When music is so baldly programmatic we should listen in two ways: with the context in mind, and purely musically. Both methods reward the listener here. Writers often use the vague word “evocative” in describing music even when the work in question doesn’t reference anything in particular. (I’ve been guilty of this myself.) The word applies here. On an abstract level the music both pleases and intrigues. But knowing the inspirations adds a level of appreciation for the composer’s skill.
Further along the album, the artist summits a mountain in Italy amid, the music suggests, chilly air. He alights in Virginia for a befuddled audio tour, where melody surfaces mutedly from a bed of pianistic static. He flies back across the pond to Germany for a slow barcarole depicting a mostly placid boat ride along the rivers of the Spreewald. Here as elsewhere in this collection Salvage makes good illustrative use of the keyboard’s full range.
A final travel piece, “Two Draughts from Lago Limbin,” takes us again to the mountains of Italy and a lake of apparently potable water. Obbligatos suggest a peaceful whiling away of a beautiful day, while scales and arpeggios seem to depict the slopes of the Dolomites as well as the drinking of the lakewater by a wordless narrator.
The album closes with a restless, indeed grumpy return to home and the everyday, titled “Rientry.” Like the other bookend, it churns along on an uncommon rhythm or time signature. Triplets alternate with straight notes in humming waves as Chopin-esque melodymaking floats overhead and underneath. An indecisive ending suggests the traveler is already looking ahead to his next journey.
Salvage continues translating specific imagery into music with the seven-movement Moments from Proust. It’s a natural connection, both because of Proust’s famous preoccupation with small things touching off troves of memory and because of the importance of music in Proust’s (also seven-part) In Search of Lost Time.
The clustering of notes and selective sustains of the first piece, “Dreams of Travel and Love,” effectively convey the childhood imagination of the young author-to-be. Waltz rhythms sparkle in a movement set in a busy restaurant with live music. The spooky “Saint-Loup’s Watch” illustrates the ticking of a watch belonging to one of the sprawling novel’s key characters. Not surprisingly, Salvage couldn’t resist also musicalizing the supremely colorful Baron de Charlus, one of two characters reflected in the jolly, then hesitant fourth movement.
Throughout the Proust suite Salvage’s piano artistry reels characters into the keyboard like a roll into a player piano. Part two of the sequence begins with a sleeping scene depicted as both charming and impassioned, with a jazzy twist. It strikes me as especially French. A more fraught depiction of stillness follows with quiet theatricality as, harking back to the album’s opening track, Proust’s fictional counterpart Marcel listens to a street musician and hesitates, hesitates, before eventually dashing for a train. In this double-movement the composer’s muse seems to lose some focus. One just wants poor Marcel to quit woolgathering and get a move on.
Taken together, the scenes and stories from the composer’s travels and from Proust’s massive novel give the album the feeling of ballet music, full of stylized movement and accentuated emotional peaks. It’s a glowing and colorful journey.
Travels have inspired much music over the centuries, from Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture and Dvořák’s explorations of American music to Gabriel Kahane’s Book of Travelers and Cyrrca’s cross-genre epics. Dreams of Love and Travel is a worthy addition to that peripatetic tradition.
— Jon Sobel, 10.28.2025
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
Listen to full streaming tracks while you browse the site. New tracks enabled for streaming every month. Click on the button to open up the radio player.
