Albinoni's Adagio: Sunday, March 4

You've seen this movie before. Or one just like it.

A very slow bass line played on an organ.

The man and the woman stand at the train station.  He must leave to go half a continent away. 

Cue violins. Strung with the nerves of your heart stretched over the bridge, wound round the ebony pegs and turned to an open G. 

They kiss, they part, he boards the train. 

 Suddenly, the music fades. A solo violin comes to the fore ... strange scalar runs. Confusion.  

The trains pulls away from the station.  

The organ, the violins, come back, stronger, tauter than ever.  

The mans stands on the platform behind the woman. He's decided to stay.

And you've heard the music. Tomaso Albinoni's Adagio in G minor. A great chestnut of classical music, almost a cliché. Except that it isn't.

For one thing, its source is a bit of a mystery. For another, cliché or not, it's beautiful. More about the mystery just a little later.

And so here's an interesting opportunity:

The Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Chamber Orchestra will perform it live on Sunday, March 4, at 2:30 p.m. in St. Matthew Lutheran Church, 123 Market St., Bloomsburg.

St. Matthew Church has, by the way ... a real pipe organ (above).

The performance is free and open to the public.

Directed by Mark Jelinek, professor of music, this 47-student orchestra will perform, in addition to the adagio, Stokowski and Bach’s Passcaglia and Fugue in C minor, Gabrieli and Welker’s Sonata Pian’ e Forte, Gluck’s Overture to “Iphigenia in Aulis,” Quantz’s Concerto for Flute in G; Morricone (yeah, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly composer) and Longfield’s “The Mission: Gabriel’s Oboe” and Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 4 in E flat.

Soloists will be Ashley Miller, flute; Alan Hack, organ; Karena McCarty, oboe; and Christiana Smith, horn.

About the mystery of the Albinoni Adagio: Albinoni lived from 1671 to 1751, the Italian baroque. I'm no musicologist ... but it's hard to get past the romanticism of the piece and place it in the 1700s. In fact, it just might be a twentieth-century piece. Italian critic, musicologist and composer Remo Giazotto (1910-1998) claimed to have found a fragment of a manuscript of Albinoni's work ... and constructed the Adagio in G minor from that manuscript. Who is the true composer?

In truth, does it matter?

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all. Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know 

— John Keats

PS: Try this on for a strange version, by of all people, The Doors.

— EGF