The Magnificent Mr. Handel

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Music reviews of The Magnificent Mr. Handel

Music Review: Magnificent is the word
Rating: 5 Stars

These recordings were made in the St. James Church, Great Packington, Warwickshire, England, in September, 1969, and originally released on two Columbia LPs, in 1970 and 1972. I bought and grew fond of them then, and I'm happy to see them available again on a budget-priced CD. The music here, entirely instrumental, is "culled for the most part from the operas and oratorios that were the bread-and-butter of Handel's work," to quote the liner notes. This music celebrates the grand, the impressive, the ceremonial, the magnificent side of Handel; the disc is well named. If this CD has a fault, it is that there is too much of grandeur, of splendor, of the stately (there are no less than eleven marches), and too little of the intimate, the introspective, the quiet, the meditative; it makes no attempt to strike a balance.

The engineering is good, if not exceptional; while the sound does not provide the ultimate degree of clarity and focus (not unusual in recordings made in churches), it is smooth and pleasing; these recordings carry their years honorably and wear well. Biggs's role here is a modest, supporting one (the two brief concertos included are not for organ): he plays organ continuo and occasional passages of accompaniment or decoration. His instrument is the Great Packington organ on which Handel himself performed, but it is not prominently displayed. Overall I cannot fault the idiomatic, engaging, alternately spirited or stately performances of Groves, the Royal Philharmonic, and Biggs.

These recordings predate the obsession with period instruments and the efforts to recreate the conditions of performance heard in Handel's day; they are old-fashioned, full-blooded "modern" performances on modern instruments. I find them thoroughly satisfying, and the sonorities and tonal balances more pleasing to my ears than those of period-instruments ensembles. But period-instruments purists may want to be warned away; they, however, probably will not be drawn to this kind of free-ranging anthology in the first place.

If you like baroque instrumental music, I think you'll find this CD pretty hard to resist.

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