Adagio in G minor by Albinoni for Cello and Piano - transcribed and arranged by Len Rhodes. Now available as a sheet music download at www.lenrhodesmusic.com
In 1945, the Italian academic Remo Giazotto published a book on Albinoni entitled The Violin Music of the Venetian Dilettante. Albinoni was just one area of expertise for Giazotto. Others included the composers Vivaldi and Busoni, as well as the music of the Baroque and Classical periods in Giazotto’s native Genoa. The academic’s expertise on the life and music of Albinoni led him to complete an Albinoni fragment, which he said he had discovered in the Saxon State Library in Dresden, while he was trying to salvage manuscripts after it was bombed in the second World War. This produced what is known as the ‘Albinoni Adagio’, but should surely, at the very least, be called the ‘Albinoni–Giazotto Adagio’. Giazotto’s purported discovery of this tiny manuscript fragment (consisting of a few opening measures of the melody line and basso continuo portion) from a slow second movement of an otherwise unknown trio sonata led to the development of this Adagio.