Albinoni: 12 Concerti a cinque

Conducted by Christopher Hogwood, the Academy of Ancient Music performs Tomaso Albinoni’s 12 Concerti a cinque, a collection of concertos by the Italian composer, published in 1722. Soloists: Andrew Manze (Violin), Frank de Bruine, (Oboe I); Alfredo Bernardini, (Oboe II).

Conducted by Christopher Hogwood, the Academy of Ancient Music performs Tomaso Albinoni’s 12 Concerti a cinque, a collection of concertos by the Italian composer, published in 1722.

Tomaso Albinoni’s 12 Concerti a cinque

12 Concerti a cinque (op. 9) is a collection of concertos by the Italian composer Tomaso Albinoni, published in 1722.

The most famous piece from Albinoni’s Opus 9 is the Concerto in D minor for oboe (Opus 9, Number 2). It is known for its slow movement. This concerto is probably the second best-known work of Albinoni after the Adagio in G minor (which was once believed to be a reconstruction based on a fragment by Albinoni, but was actually composed by 20th-century musicologist and Albinoni biographer Remo Giazotto).

The concertos were dedicated to Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, and were first published by Michel-Charles Le Cène in Amsterdam. It is possible, but not certain, that they were written in the Elector’s court during a 1722 visit there by Albinoni during performances of his theatrical compositions. These are perhaps his most recognizable works.

The 12 concertos are:

  1. Concerto for violin in B flat major, Op. 9, No. 1
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio
    3. Allegro
  2. Concerto for oboe in D minor, Op. 9, No. 2
    1. Allegro e non presto
    2. Adagio,
    3. Allegro
  3. Concerto for 2 oboes in F major, Op. 9, No. 3
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio
    3. Allegro
  4. Concerto for violin in A major, Op. 9, No. 4
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio
    3. Allegro
  5. Concerto for oboe in C major, Op. 9, No. 5
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio
    3. Allegro
  6. Concerto for 2 oboes in G major, Op. 9, No. 6
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio
    3. Allegro
  7. Concerto for violin in D major, Op. 9, No. 7
    1. Allegro,
    2. Andante e sempre piano
    3. Allegro
  8. Concerto for oboe in G minor, Op. 9, No. 8
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio
    3. Allegro
  9. Concerto for 2 oboes in C major, Op. 9, No. 9
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio
    3. Allegro
  10. Concerto for violin in F major, Op. 9, No. 10
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio,
    3. Allegro
  11. Concerto for oboe in B flat major, Op. 9, No. 11
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio
    3. Allegro
  12. Concerto for 2 oboes in D major, Op. 9, No. 12
    1. Allegro
    2. Adagio
    3. Allegro

Tomaso Albinoni

Tomaso Albinoni, 12 Concerti a cinque
Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni (8 June 1671 – 17 January 1751) was an Italian composer of the Baroque era.

Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni (8 June 1671 – 17 January 1751) was an Italian composer of the Baroque era.

Born in Venice, Republic of Venice, to Antonio Albinoni, 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. In 1694 he dedicated his Opus 1 to a fellow Venetian, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (grand-nephew of Pope Alexander VIII).

His first opera, Zenobia, Regina de Palmireni, was produced in Venice in 1694. Albinoni was possibly employed in 1700 as a violinist to Charles IV, Duke of Mantua, to whom he dedicated his Opus 2 collection of instrumental pieces. In 1701 he wrote his hugely popular suites Opus 3 and dedicated that collection to Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany.

In 1705, he married Margherita Rimondi; Antonino Biffi, the maestro di cappella of San Marco was a witness, and evidently was a friend of Albinoni. Albinoni seems to have no other connection with that primary musical establishment in Venice, however, and achieved his early fame as an opera composer in many cities in Italy, including Venice, Genoa, Bologna, Mantua, Udine, Piacenza, and Naples.

During this time, he was also composing instrumental music in abundance: prior to 1705, he mostly wrote trio sonatas and violin concertos, but between then and 1719 he wrote solo sonatas and concertos for oboe.

Unlike most contemporary composers, he appears never to have sought a post at either a church or noble court, but then he had independent means and could afford to compose music independently. In 1722, Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, to whom Albinoni had dedicated a set of twelve concertos, invited him to direct two of his operas in Munich.

Around 1740, a collection of Albinoni’s violin sonatas was published in France as a posthumous work, and scholars long presumed that meant that Albinoni had died by that time. However, it appears he lived on in Venice in obscurity; a record from the parish of San Barnaba indicates Tomaso Albinoni died in Venice in 1751, of diabetes mellitus.

Albinoni’s music and influence

Most of his operatic works have been lost, largely because they were not published during his lifetime. However, nine collections of instrumental works were published. These were met with considerable success and consequent reprints. He is therefore known more as a composer of instrumental music (99 sonatas, 59 concerti, and 9 sinfonie) today.

In his lifetime these works were compared favorably with those of Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi. His nine collections published in Italy, Amsterdam, and London were either dedicated to or sponsored by an impressive list of southern European nobility. Albinoni wrote at least fifty operas, of which twenty-eight were produced in Venice between 1723 and 1740. Albinoni himself claimed 81 operas (naming his second-to-last opera, in the libretto, as his 80th).

In spite of his enormous operatic output, today he is most noted for his instrumental music, especially his oboe concerti (from 12 Concerti a cinque op. 7 and, most famously, 12 Concerti a cinque op. 9).

He is the first Italian known to employ the oboe as a solo instrument in concerti (c. 1715, in his op. 7) and publish such works, although earlier concerti featuring solo oboe were probably written by German composers such as Telemann or Händel. In Italy, Alessandro Marcello published his well-known oboe concerto in D minor a little later, in 1717. Albinoni also employed the instrument often in his chamber works and operas.

His instrumental music attracted great attention from Johann Sebastian Bach, who wrote at least two fugues on Albinoni’s themes (Fugue in A major on a theme by Tomaso Albinoni, BWV 950, and Fugue in B minor on a theme by Tomaso Albinoni, BWV 951) and frequently used his basses for harmonic exercises for his pupils. Part of Albinoni’s work was lost in World War II with the destruction of the Dresden State Library. As a result, little is known of his life and music after the mid-1720s.

The famous Adagio in G minor, the subject of many modern recordings, is thought by some to be a musical hoax composed by Remo Giazotto. 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”. This provides support for Giazotto’s account that he did base his composition on an earlier source.

Sources

M. Özgür Nevres

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