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Soul Music

Adagio in G minor

Soul Music

BBC

Music, Music Commentary

4.7831 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2014

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, is one of the most popular and moving pieces of music.

But, as academic and composer Andrew Gant explains, it wasn't written by Albinoni and is now attributed to 20th century Italian composer, Giazotto.

Award-winning veteran BBC foreign correspondent, Malcolm Brabant recalls the ' cellist of Sarajevo', Vedran Smailovic, playing it everyday for weeks amidst the wreckage of the beautiful city, as Serbian gunfire raged around.

Actress Virginia McKenna explains its importance to her and her late husband, actor Bill Travers, who died in 1994. The piece was played at the beginning and end of his memorial service.

And TV producer, Gareth Gwenlan reveals why it was chosen as the theme for the character played by Wendy Craig, in the BBC’s 1970s TV sitcom, Butterflies.

Producer: Lucy Lunt

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2014.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The Traitors is back, and so is that mysterious cloaked figure with the familiar fringe.

0:06.6

Yeah, it's me.

0:07.8

And when you've watched Claudia in the castle, join me, Ed Gamble, for the official visualised companion podcast.

0:13.6

And remember, I'll be listening.

0:15.8

Okay?

0:16.6

No, seriously, I love it.

0:18.4

What a faithful.

0:19.7

We'll unpack betrayals and spill scandalous secrets with celebrity guests, traitors' legends,

0:25.0

and murdered and banished players.

0:27.0

The Traitors Uncloat.

0:28.3

Watch on EyePlayer, listen for more on BBC Sounds.

0:32.1

Anybody who ever went to Sarajevo was immediately captured by it,

0:35.0

because it was a great European city.

0:37.1

It was a place of culture. It was a place of culture.

0:39.2

It was a place where musicians and cinematographers and filmmakers had always come.

0:45.3

And it's extremely beautiful as well. It's set in this valley surrounded by magnificent mountains.

0:51.8

And these mountains were the places where the Serbs were using positions to be able

0:57.3

to fire down upon and what moved everybody who went there was that there was this European

1:02.3

city that was being battered and its people were being murdered by artillery shells and mortars

1:08.7

and machine guns and the rest of the world was doing absolutely nothing.

1:13.2

I'm Markie Brabant and I was a wandering correspondent in the Balkans during the wars of Yugoslavia.

1:21.3

The siege of Sarajevo really effectively started towards the end of April, the beginning of May, in 1992, when the Serbs really unleashed

...

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