Albinoni's 350th Birthday Celebration: The Large Collector's Edition with Many CD Premieres He is considered the creator of one of the greatest classical music hits ever - and yet, despite the immense popularity of the music of his era, he is still a great unknown. That can now change! Baroque master Tomaso Albinoni, a contemporary of colleagues such as Bach, Handel and Vivaldi, is the anniversary composer of 2021, as the music world simultaneously commemorates the 350th anniversary of his birth (June 8) and the 270th anniversary of his death (January 17). To mark the occasion, the Warner label Erato is releasing a unique treasure: a large portion of Albinoni's works as a comprehensive 16-CD edition. Half of the program consists of modern remastered CD premieres. Albinoni is associated with "the" Adagio of classical music par excellence. However, it was not written by the brilliant Venetian, but by the musicologist Remo Giazotto, who composed it in the 1950s from fragments attributed to Albinoni. About ten years later, the great conductor Claudio Scimone set out to interpretively explore the real Albinoni over a long period of time with his chamber orchestra I Solisti Veneti. This record-historical feat forms the repertoire of the anniversary box set - above all with an overwhelming number of instrumental concertos, but also many other discoveries. The composer, who was incidentally held in high esteem by his German colleague Johann Sebastian Bach, is said to have written 50 operas. Most of them have not survived. One exception is the Festa pastorale Il Nascimento dell' Aurora - a work based on ancient mythologies, which Albinoni composed for a birthday celebration among the high nobility and which can be heard here in a live recording from 1983. Other vocal gems include the Intermezzo Pimpinone and the serenata Il concilio de' pianeti.