Tomaso Albinoni

Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751) was an Italian musician and composer of the Baroque period, who was born and resided in Venice.  In the view of this writer he was a realised soul.

Albinoni was famous in his day as an opera composer. However, most of these operas were unpublished and the manuscripts were lost during the destruction of the German city of Dresden in 1944-5. 

He is mainly remembered today for his instrumental music mostly written in the concerto and sonata forms for strings and wind instruments such as the oboe.

The now famous Adagio attributed to Albinoni was reconstructed by Giazotto in 1945 from a manuscript fragment and is played at a slow tempo curiously not found in Albinoni's surviving music.

 

Bibliography

Michael Talbot, Tomaso Albinoni: the Venetian composer and his world (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)

Michael Talbot, Venetian music in the age of Vivaldi (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 1999)

 

From John Noyce, Enlightened Musicians (lulu press, 2015)