This double-disc package from Universal’s Panorama series combines serviceable performances of a number of key Handel works. It should have instant appeal to budget-minded collectors who seek a generalist overview of the music and for whom completeness is not necessarily a pre-requisite. Specialists probably will be more interested in some of the remaining Op. 6 Concerti Grossi, for example, and will not need the Op. 4 No. 6 Harp Concerto; but nevertheless, these are enjoyable and diligent offerings, and very well recorded.
Trevor Pinnock’s performances of the Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, both of which are heard complete, are instantly recommendable. The pomp and ceremony are brilliantly captured, as is the easy grace and lightness of the various dance movements, especially in the Water Music, though at no point does Pinnock let us forget that this also is music of great daring and originality. One of the more memorable qualities of his authenticist approach is that it does indeed allow us to hear the music in an instrumental setting that would certainly have been familiar to the composer himself. In the grandiloquent Fireworks Music, I doubt that concessions of scale (I don’t imagine Pinnock used the 24 oboes, dozen bassoons, and supernumerary brass that Handel had at his disposal in 1748!) count for much given the spontaneity and frisson of these interpretations.
Arguably, John Eliot Gardiner’s performance of the Water Music has greater majesty at times, but it’s also far more idiosyncratic, too, and the recording from Philips is not quite as fine as DG’s for Pinnock. Besides, I know of few recordings that strive so faithfully to recapture the spirit of the times in which this music came into being, and these constantly illuminating readings may even tempt you to obtain the missing links in Pinnock’s survey of Handel’s Op. 6 concertos.
