Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, HWV351
Handel's Fireworks Music
The Gramophone Choice
Coupled with Concerti per due cori, HWV332-334
Ensemble Zefiro / Alfredo Bernardini
Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 88697 36791-2 (69’ · DDD) Buy from Amazon
The Italian ensemble Zefiro, directed by oboist Alfredo Bernardini, specialise in 18th-century music that gives prominence towards wind instruments. This lends itself to the Music for the Royal Fireworks. Zefiro play the grand Overture with the perfect synthesis of splendour and dance-like charisma (too many versions possess too little of the latter). ‘La Réjouissance’ trips along lightly without a hint of clumsiness, but still has ample juicy magnificence. Theis zesty and fluid performance is a welcome change from stodgy readings in which everything is hammered home mercilessly. Zefiro bring a marvellous sense of light and shade to this music. Maybe Bernardini’s sparkling and communicative approach would have been too subtle for the great British outdoors in 1749 but it is curious that this beautifully engineered recording was made outside in the cloisters of a former Jesuit college in Sicily.
Zefiro also perform all three of the Concerti per due cori (1747-48) that Handel arranged for orchestra and two ‘choirs’ of woodwind and brass. These were intended as entr’actes in oratorio concerts, and it is fun to play ‘name that tune’. These shapely performances are phrased and paced to perfection, and exploit an enjoyable range of instrumental colours (whether oboe trios or bucolic horns, almost everything here feels right). This is one of the most enjoyable discs of Handel’s orchestral music in a long time.
Additional Recommendation
Coupled with Berenice, HWV38 – Overture (arr Whittaker). Concerti a due cori in F, HWV333 (arr Mackerras). Concertos – in D, HWV335a; F, HWV331. Water Music, HWV38-50 (arr Harty) – Allegro; Bourrée; Hornpipe; Allegro decisio
wind ensemble; London Symphony Orchestra; Pro Arte Orchestra / Charles Mackerras
Testament SBT1253 (76' · ADD) Recorded 1956, 1959, 1977 Buy from Amazon
Over the night of April 13-14, 1959, in St Gabriel’s Church, Cricklewood, a recording session took place, historic in every way, when the young Charles Mackerras conducted a band of 62 wind players plus nine percussionists in Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks. With no fewer than 26 oboists topping the ensemble, it was only possible to assemble such a band after all concerts and operas had finished for the day.
They began at 11pm and finished at 2.30 in the morning, yet so far from sounding tired or jaded, the players responded to the unique occasion with a fizzing account of Handel’s six movements. The success of this extraordinary project fully justified Mackerras’s determination to restore the astonishing array of instruments that Handel himself had assembled for the original performance in Green Park in April 1749.
It’s thrilling to hear that 1959 recording, at last transferred to CD, with sound that’s still of demonstration quality, full and spacious, with a wide stereo spread. It’s true that Mackerras takes the introduction to the Overture and the Siciliana at speeds far slower than he might have chosen more recently, but this was a recording which marked a breakthrough in what later developed as the period performance movement.
As a coupling for the Fireworks Music, Mackerras devised a composite Concerto a due cori which draws on two works written with that title around 1747. It makes a splendid piece, in which the massed horns bray gloriously. Whatever the degree of authenticity, this is an electrifying collection, superbly transferred.
