A classic of film scores, Albinoni’s Adagio isn’t a lost baroque masterpiece; it’s a spoof composed by his biographer in the 1950s. Harmless fun, asks Phil Hebblethwaite, or a savage exposé of classical music’s obsession with authenticity and dead men?
Unheard for 200 years, Vivaldi became a star for the second time when an Italian group had a hit album with The Four Seasons in 1955 – the same year that rock & roll exploded. But it was a brilliant 1970 recording by Britain’s Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields that, for better or worse, made it truly omnipresent