Music for Advent: Albinoni's Adagio

I bought a recording of this my sophomore year in college (first year away from home) in the campus bookstore, before campus bookstores were owned by chain bookstores. Back when I knew NOTHING (I know less now) about music that wasn’t played on FM stations (Ask yet grandpa! Punks.) But it was cheap and it was “classical” Xmas music (i.e., not Andy Williams or Der Bingle), so how could I lose?

The album was mostly Bach and Torelli, Corelli and Manfredi. Nothing recognizably “Christmas” at all. Exactly what I was going for.  Oh, and the Pachelbel Canon, which was all the rage back then and probably why I bought it. I had no idea what the “Albinoni Adagio” was. But it quickly became the reason I played the album over and over, and still have it.

This recording is not that one, but it is, as that one, a version scored for organ. Odd, since everything else on the album is performed by a small string orchestra. That recording has accompanied me in Advent every year since…1974?

Over 50 years? Damn, I’m getting old.

(The interesting thing about this memory is that I can still recall the moment I picked this album. I still see the (long gone, long since replaced) bookstore where I indulged my desire to buy literature I would read for class (and how quickly I got tired of that!). My excitement at buying a record for no better reason than that it was Xmas music. I’ve added to that collection quite a bit since. My marriage was only 3 years in the future, at the time. “Only.” At the time that was oceans of time away, as inconceivable as old age. Funny what time does to the perception of time.)