WINGATE’S transcription of
ALBINONI’S ADAGIO IN G MINOR
for Violoncello and Piano

Transcription Date:
2019

Duration:
8'

Notes:
This magnificently melancholy piece has enjoyed an immense popularity as an icon of elegant musical sadness, as well as a bit of confusion, since it turns out that Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751) didn’t actually write it. Now known to be a pseudo-Baroque (or more kindly — neo-Baroque) work by the 20th-century musicologist and Albinoni biographer Remo Giazotto, this fact has fazed almost no one, and the piece is performed constantly, as well as being used in dozens of film soundtracks.

Wingate created this transcription for his own performance in a concert celebrating Vedran Smailović (a.k.a. the ‘Cellist of Sarajevo’), who famously played Albinoni's Adagio in bombed-out buildings during the Bosnian War. The rich string-choir harmonies of the original version are here heroically taken by a single cello in difficult double- and triple-stopping passages, while bolstered throughout under the auspices of the piano part. With such arrangements as this, and many others, this most famous piece that Albinoni never wrote occupies a curious cultural position, perhaps evoking the modern idea of Baroque-ness as a dream of the past, more than the actual Baroque itself.