Albinoni Violin Sonatas by Rebinguet-Sudre

Albinoni has long suffered the indignity of being known primarily through a work he didn’t write. That Adagio — the one you hear at funerals and in elevator arrangements — was cobbled together in the twentieth century by the musicologist Remo Giazotto, who claimed to have reconstructed it from a manuscript fragment. No such fragment has ever been found. The real Albinoni is something else entirely, and these five violin sonatas go a considerable distance toward making the case for him.

What strikes you first, listening to Guillaume Rebinguet-Sudre in this music, is how un-Vivaldian it all sounds. That’s not a criticism. Venice in the early eighteenth century wasn’t a monolith; Albinoni carved out his own territory, quieter in its ambitions, more concerned with line than display. He was an amateur in the old sense — a man of independent means, son of a prosperous stationer, never beholden to a patron or an institution. He never held a court position, never scrambled for a job at one of the Venetian ospedali the way lesser talents did. That freedom shows. His music doesn’t perform anxiety.

The three published sonatas here come from op. 6, issued in 1711. They are beautifully proportioned things — not short on craft, but never flaunting it. The slow movements, in particular, breathe with a vocal quality that makes perfect sense once you learn that Albinoni was trained as a singer as well as a violinist, and that he composed something in the neighborhood of eighty operas across his career. That lyric instinct didn’t stay in the theater.

Rebinguet-Sudre plays with clean articulation and a tone that carries warmth without ever getting thick or sentimental. In the slow movement of the Sonata in c minor, op. 6, no. 10, he floats the melody above Claire Gratton’s cello line with what I can only describe as a kind of courtly patience — no pushing, no reaching for effect, just the phrase doing what it needs to do. Jean-Luc Ho’s harpsichord fills the middle ground without cluttering it; the continuo playing here is genuinely thoughtful, which is rarer than it should be.

The outlier in the program — and the most fascinating piece — is the Sonata in B-flat written for Johann Georg Pisendel. Pisendel was no ordinary customer: he would become concertmaster at the Dresden court chapel and was, by every account, one of the great virtuosos of the age. He arrived in Venice in 1716 as part of a Grand Tour with his employer’s son, the young Prince Friedrich Augustus, and left with a suitcase full of manuscript music — works Vivaldi, Albinoni, and others wrote specifically for him. The B-flat sonata was never published. Albinoni almost certainly wrote it for himself first, a kind of private reckoning with what Pisendel’s craft had challenged him to imagine.

The second movement is a fugue with substantial double-stopping — not showy, exactly, but genuinely difficult, and it reveals something about Albinoni that the published sonatas only hint at. He could write counterpoint with the best of them; his contemporaries knew this. The third movement gives Gratton a notably prominent role, the cello emerging from its usual harmonic function to carry real melodic weight. Rebinguet-Sudre and Gratton handle the dialogue with natural ease, neither player dominating where the music asks for give-and-take.

Does this album displace everything else in this repertoire? Not necessarily — there are fine accounts from Andrew Manze and others that brought real intelligence to these works. But this ensemble brings something particular: a sense of conversation rather than rendition, of music being discovered rather than delivered. Albinoni was a marginal figure by the standards of his own age, working outside the official structures that conferred prestige. Listening here, you wonder what the gatekeepers were thinking. This is music of genuine distinction — elegant, contrapuntally assured, and alive in ways the Giazotto Adagio never was and never will be.