ALBINIONI: Oboe Concerti vol. 2

Alty, Alison, Camden, Anthony, Georgiadis, John, London Virtuosi

8.553002

Albinoni's first set of Concerti a cinque with parts for one or two oboes, published in Amsterdam as his Opus 7 in 1715, has the distinction of being the first such collection by an Italian composer ever published. The composer dedicated them to a local nobleman and amateur musician, Giovanni Donato Correggio. The works are divided into four groups, each of which begins with a concerto for strings (one of these, No. 11, contains passages for a solo violin), continues with a concerto for two oboes and finishes with one for a single oboe. Whereas the concerti with one oboe are fully mature in conception, those with two oboes are more varied, as if Albinoni, in 1715, had not yet decided how to structure them. Certainly, the two-oboe works, which are all in the traditional trumpet keys of C major and D major, carry strong traces of the trumpet sonatas that Bolognese composers, in particular, had written at the end of the previous century. • The sixth concerto from Opus 9 (1722), Albinoni's sequel to Opus 7, shows how he later came to model his two-oboe concerti on those with one oboe, greatly expanding the dimensions and elaborating the form. The three concerti with single oboe (Opus 7, Nos. 3, 6 and 9) all have finales in 3 / 8 or 6 / 8 that exploit Albinoni's favourite rhythmic device of hemiola (where twice three units becomes thrice two units or the reverse).

CD

20.11.1995

730099400220