Handel: Water Music

Erato captured the finest period of the Dutch period-instrument ensemble the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra – the first half of the 1980s. Benefiting from the presence of a few of the most extraordinary musicians of their generation, including the London violinist Monica Huggett, cellist Jaap Ter Linden or flautist Ricardo Kanji, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra stood out at the time with its round, silky textures and its extraordinarily fluid musicality. It was in June and July 1992 that Ton Koopman recorded the Water Music. In the generous acoustics of Amsterdam's Waalse Kerk, Ton Koopman let the brilliant timbres burst forth more naturally. Here is a Water Music to be rediscovered, formidably dynamic and energetic, inhabited by an almost-Latin sense of urgency, in which the horns explode with joy, and the oboes beam. The rhythms burst forth, melodies are drawn with clear precision, and polyphonies are decked out in a gallant character, like the opening Minuet from the Suite in G major (HWV 350): here, Handel carries on a dialogue in spirit with his illustrious contemporary Georg Philipp Telemann.