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Not to be pedantic, but, it's more than "one piece." (YTs for musical examples.)

Posted by John Marks (M) on August 24, 2014 at 14:01:16

In Reply to: Since we're talking about Barber does anyone else find his Adagio too "brooding" posted by Old SteveA on August 24, 2014 at 09:50:45:

When people talk about "Barber's 'Adagio' ," most of the time they mean a string-orchestra arrangement of the slow movement of Barber's String Quartet. In an ideal world, the four voices of a string quartet should naturally move at more of a walking pace and less of a funeral march than would many instrumentalists gathered into several sections.

Picking one performance at random from YT (and it seems to be the the Tokyo Quartet but I don't know which iteration), subjectively it seems to move a little faster than many orchestral performances.

What do you think?



Disregarding possible differences in intro and outro times on the two videos, it does look to be 2 minutes shorter than at least one Bernstein performance. Which I admit is not necessarily saying much--Bernstein could stretch out conducting a ham sandwich to ten minutes, making soulful faces all the while... .

OK, time for my meds.

The other officially authorized incarnation of the work is an "Agnus Dei setting for unaccompanied chorus or choir, though I have never ever heard of it actually being used in a liturgy.



Perhaps because most choral singers can't produce a steady tone at very low volumes for long-held notes, and perhaps because the need to pronounce the words as clearly as possible takes up breath, the best Barber "Agnus Dei" I know of (Accentus/Equilbey) scoots by about one minute faster than the above string-quartet version, and about three minutes faster than the Bernstein version I mentioned but did not link to.

To me, they are three totally different pieces of music. And for my own tastes, I rank them Agnus Dei/String Quartet/String Orchestra.

I hope that helps.

JM

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