Search - Handel, Gardiner, Ebs :: Water Music Suites 1-3

Handel wrote a colorful new page in the history of English music with the Water Music, bringing horns into the orchestra for the first time. Better than any practitioner to date, John Eliot Gardiner understands the important role these instruments play in the suites in F and D. On this recording he prefaces the opening F-major suite with Handel's glorious F-major variant of the Allegro that begins the D-major suite--four minutes of raucous blasting from the horns that gets one's attention in a big way. At the end of the F-major suite, he does it again, popping in the F-major variant of the "Hornpipe" from the D-major suite. By the time the music of these two variants comes around again, in the D-major suite, we're happy to hear it with the trumpets added and doubly satisfied that things have been rounded off so nicely. The playing of the whole band is spectacular, and the recording vivid, with splendid impact and immediacy. --Ted Libbey