Handel: Water Music, Royal Fireworks, Etc

This is a fine Handel compilation that provides a nice overview of his orchestral music with brass instruments, as well as his only incidental score (music written to accompany the action of a play). Christopher Hogwood uses the arrangement that Handel made of the Fireworks Music for normal-sized forces, including strings, which were absent from the original. All the music is played with a fine sense of style, and a goodly bit of the "pomp and circumstance" that Handel above all others knew how to capture in music. At two discs for the price of one, this is an extremely good deal. --David Hurwitz

Already in its LP for this Fireworks Music was one of the best performances available (certainly the best of the period-instrument versions), and on Compact Disc it makes a vivid impact. Steering a middle course between the vast instrumental armies which seek to re-create the original open-air atmosphere of the 1749 celebrations (with the horns baying across London's Green Park) and decorous concert-hall approaches, Hogwood secures grandeur without grandiosity, and there is plenty of excitement in the more jubilant movements. RF, reviewing the LP, would have liked more horns, but I didn't personally feel any lack in this regard: I do agree with him, however, that the properly exuberant drums do tend to screen out the bass line in La rejouissance. The F major Suite from the Water Music, here ending not in that unsatisfactory way with the D minor Allegro but with the Hornpipe better known in its later D major variant, is played in a brisk and lively, perhaps rather less committed fashion: the baroque oboes add a distinctive colour, as do the natural horns, whose intonation, if not entirely impeccable, is probably better than that of their predecessors on the Thames barge.

-- Lionel Salter, Gramophone [3/1983] Reviewing L'Oiseau-Lyre 400 059