Patrick Gallois belongs to the generation of French musicians leading highly successful international careers as both soloist and conductor. From the age of 17 he studied the flute with Jean-Pierre Rampal at the Paris Conservatoire and at the age of 21 was appointed principal flute in the Orchestre national de France under Lorin Maazel, playing under many famous conductors, including Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Pierre Boulez, Karl Böhm, Eugen Jochum, and Sergiu Celibidache. He held this post until 1984, when he decided to focus on his solo career, which has subsequently taken him throughout the world.
Ransom Wilson has long been recognized internationally as one of the greatest flutists of his generation. After graduation from the Juilliard School in 1973, he spent a year in Paris as a private student of Jean-Pierre Rampal. As flute soloist, he has appeared in concert with some of the greatest orchestras and artists of our time, including the Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, London Symphony, Frederica von Stade, Jessye Norman, Thomas Hampson, Susan Graham, Dolora Zajick, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Hilary Hahn, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Sir James Galway, and many others. François Dumontis a prize winner of the most prestigious international competitions: the Queen Elisabeth Competition (Brussels), the Chopin Competition (Warsaw), the Cleveland International Competition in the United States and the Clara Haskil Competition in Switzerland.
Sir James Galway OBE (born December 8, 1939) is a Northern Ireland–born virtuoso flutist from Belfast, nicknamed "The Man With the Golden Flute". Following in the footsteps of Jean-Pierre Rampal, he became one of the first flute players to establish an international career as a soloist.
EMI's double-CD collection of Ravi Shankar's works including Western instruments, however, is one of the exceptions, for it adds a great deal even to the conversation carried on by those who have paid attention to the career of the man widely considered modern-day India's greatest musician. The attraction here, in a nutshell, is that this CD set brings together music recorded between 1966 and 1982, much of it only sporadically available up to now. There are two concertos for Shankar's sitar (a large Indian lute with sympathetically resonating strings) and orchestra, plus works he wrote for collaborations with violinist Yehudi Menuhin and flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal. For purposes of comparison, there's also one performance by Shankar alone.