Handel: Water Music & Music for the Royal Fireworks

Play La Paix before La Réjouissance. The calmer movement makes the next one’s bright, direct gestures more striking, and two minuets still remain afterwards. This small route through Music for the Royal Fireworks captures the appeal of Pinnock’s Handel: ceremonial splendour has proportion, pauses and contrasting steps, rather than simply one sustained display of grandeur.

Handel’s works belong to different occasions: Water Music is associated with the royal Thames entertainment of 1717, while the Fireworks music dates from 1749. This album is a later performance, not a record of either event. Water Music was recorded in London’s Henry Wood Hall in April 1983; the Fireworks sessions took place at St John’s Smith Square in August 1984. The linked pairing is a 2009 reissue.

Follow this edition’s sequence

Water Music occupies nineteen tracks here. The F major suite is followed by a combined D and G major grouping, so movement numbers from another recording may not line up. The Fireworks music then occupies six tracks, from its overture to the two separately indexed minuets. Long openings and compact dances give the programme its proportions; skipping every unfamiliar movement would remove much of that changing scale.

A tune has smaller moving parts

In Water Music, the broad wind tune can initially take all your attention. On a return, follow the shorter notes beneath it and the length of each release. A pause can alter the weight of the next step. You need not memorise dance names to hear this: a hornpipe and a minuet suggest different kinds of movement even when the instruments remain familiar.

Brightness needs contrast

Hear La Paix before La Réjouissance and notice how the latter’s directness gains from the preceding calm. Neither needs to represent a literal sound effect from a royal spectacle. The attraction now is in the handing over of a melody, the return of a pulse and the brief space before a new phrase. Pinnock’s ensemble makes those details a route into music whose public face can otherwise seem overwhelmingly grand.