On The Margins

Sunday May 15, 2005

[ Art (هنر) ] Tomaso Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor

Niavaran Artistic Creations Foundation

Silicon Valley, despite its economic down-turn in recent years, can still offer an amazing cultural environment for its residents—many from a wide variety of backgrounds and including a large number of East Asian immigrant families. Earlier on Saturday, I witnessed a group of very young but talented musicians—members of the Galbraith Honor Strings—perform Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor. The concert was part of an ice-cream social put together by the El Camino Youth Symphony Association. The simple rectangular performance hall in a community center in south Palo Alto was hot and not very well ventilated. The seats were the usual folding iron ones you find in many community centers around where I live. However, none of this took away from the perfomance and its fine quality under the direction of Dr. Camilla Kolchinsky. The young musicians delivered a wonderful Adagio. I had heard the piece many times earlier, including as sound track to some movies, I believe, but in this informal setting, with other parents and friends around, it had a different impact, fine enough to get me to write this short note, do some web-digging on Albinoni, and then find things I wasn't even expecting.

I didn't know much about the history of the piece. According to some sources on the web, it seems the piece was reconstructed by one Remo Giazotto, a Milanese musicologist, who in the ruins of war, had traveled to Dresden in 1945 to complete his biography of Albinoni. According to baroquemusic.org, "Among the ruins, [Giazotto] discovered a fragment of manuscript. Only the bass line and six bars of melody had survived, possibly from the slow movement of a Trio Sonata or Sonata da Chiesa. It was from this fragment that Giazotto reconstructed the now-famous Adagio, a piece which is instantly associated with Albinoni today, yet which ironically Albinoni would doubtless hardly recognize." So, it looks like what we hear today, has been arranged for the full orchestra by Giazotto.

Many things astound me about Albinoni's Adagio, which only the history of its final arrangement among the ruins of the Second World War (50 million dead at the historic zenith of the Western civilization in modern times) seem capable of explaining to us today—its arrangement carry as powerful a story as the survived fragments based on which it is put together. First, the fragmentary quality, speaks of the broken nature of human folly and emotions in the modern world, its highs and lows, in the small and in the big, in individual form or in an organized mass. The fullness of the emotions it explores, however briefly, surround the listener, and nothing is as good as a live performance of it, and one done by young aspiring musicians.

Among other material on Albinoni, I ran into Harmony Talk, a Persian weblog which had a fine entry on Albinoni—with a complete mp3 file of the Adagio and sheet music for it. (Harmony Talk had another very interesting entry about the Musical Festival of Contemporary Persian Composers, which appears to have been held last week in Tehran at the Niavaran Artistic Creations Foundation. Had I been working in Europe or the Middle East, I would have taken off a few days and made the trip to attend this.) Although I've recently been taking some vacations in Iran, I never knew about any of this. Perhaps I ran into "Harmony Talk" because the Adagio resonates with Persian musical sensibilities no matter where they are to be found, in Silicon Valley or in Tehran.

Note: For the interested listeners, Werner Icking Music Archive carries several other pieces from Albinoni.

Silicon Valley, Music, Baroque.

2005-05-15 00:02:42.0 -- Comments [6] ; Permalink ; Trackback.