Albinoni-Giazotto: Adagio in G minor (Neo-Baroque Synthesized)

For information on the visualization, please read the note at the end. Tomaso Albinoni (1671 – 1751) was an Italian Baroque composer. His output includes operas, concertos, sonatas for one to six instruments, sinfonias, and solo cantatas. While famous in his day as an opera composer, he is known today for his instrumental music, especially his concertos. Born in Venice, the son of a wealthy paper merchant, he studied violin and singing. Relatively little is known about his life, which is surprising considering his contemporary stature as a composer, and the comparatively well-documented period in which he lived. Unlike most composers of his time, he appears never to have sought a post at either a church or noble court, but then he was a man of independent means – a composer who had a financially rather well-cushioned life, thanks to the shares he inherited in his father’s stationery firm (which manufactured playing cards, among other things) and had the option to compose music independently. “Albinoni’s Adagio” is probably one of the most famous and recognizable pieces attributed to the Baroque period; widely familiar through its frequent use in film scores, TV and advertising. The work is slow of pace, solemn of mood, and frequently transcribed for various combinations of instruments in modern times. It has appeared on countless recordings of various Baroque classics… erroneously! In truth, this famed work is not by Albinoni at all. It is a mid-20th century “neo-Baroque" creation by Remo Giazotto (1910 – 1998), an Italian musicologist, mostly known through his systematic cataloguing of the works of Tomaso Albinoni. He also wrote biographies of Albinoni and other composers, including Vivaldi. According to Giazotto, he obtained the document shortly after the end of World War II from the Saxon State Library in Dresden which had preserved most of its collection, though its buildings were destroyed in the bombing raids of February and March 1945 by the Allied Forces. Giazotto concluded that the manuscript fragment was a portion of a church sonata (sonata da chiesa, one of two standard forms of the trio sonata) in G minor composed by Albinoni, possibly as part of his Op. 4 set, around 1708. In Giazotto’s account, the fragment contained only the low-pitched supporting continuo part and a few phrases of the melody itself. From that meagre beginning, Giazotto fleshed out a complete single-movement composition according to established Baroque principles of the period, creating something generally in the style of a chaconne, in which a set of repeated pitches underlies an evolving melody. Although it is not, strictly speaking, an Albinoni composition, it does bear the characteristics of the Italian Baroque style, particularly in its overall structure. Giazotto copyrighted and published the work in 1958 (a little over 200 years after Albinoni’s death) under a title which, translated into English, reads "Adagio in G Minor for Strings and Organ, on Two Thematic Ideas and on a Figured Bass by Tomaso Albinoni." Giazotto never produced the manuscript fragment, and no official record has been found of its presence in the collection of the Saxon State Library. However, a discovery by musicologist Muska Mangano, Giazotto's last assistant before his death, has cast some doubt on that belief. Among Giazotto's papers, Mangano discovered a modern but independent manuscript transcription of the figured bass portion, and six fragmentary bars of the first violin, "bearing in the top right-hand corner a stamp stating unequivocally the Dresden provenance of the original from which it was taken." There was a continuing scholarly debate about whether the alleged fragment was real, or a musical hoax perpetrated by Giazotto, but there is no longer any doubt about Giazotto's authorship of the remainder of the work and Mangagno’s findings provide support for Giazotto's account that he did base his composition on an earlier source. I adapted my originally-posted "New Age" electronic piece, this time using shimmering choir voices, ambient strings and combinations of other sounds to create "pseudo-instruments" with familiar orchestral qualities - all coming together in a hauntingly beautiful realization of the original score. There is definitely a nod to the late Japanese artist Isao Tomita here. Rather than this piece representing an overly-indulgent, bitter-sweet cliché, I wanted the listener to get lost in an ethereal dream; travelling through memories of joy, loss, past & present, culminating in hope for the future at the resolution. As always, the use of headphones will greatly enhance the listening experience. For those wishing to follow along with the MAMM (Music Animation Machine Midi) Player, the voicing is as follows: Solo Violin - Orange Violin I/Choir I - Yellow Violin II/Choir II - Yellow-Green Viola/Choir III - Green Cello/Double Bass - Violet Cello/Bass Pizzicato - Blue Organ - Coral-Pink Organ Pedal - Rose-Pink