Handel: Water Music; Royal Fireworks (SACD review)

Federico Guglielmo, L'Arte dell'Arco.  CPO CD/SACD 777 312-2.

Everybody is striving for authenticity these days, but in the case of Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, nobody quite gets it right.  This is probably because Handel didn't leave us detailed notes on the music or because he changed things so often.  In any case, Federico Guglielmo and his L'Arte dell'Arco players come about as close as anybody, producing a good all-around recommendation in this coupling.

Things begin with the Water Music, where we usually get two or three suites of movements.  Well, it turns out, the suites are a relatively recent concoction.  Guglielmo plays the various movements in the order they are found in the earliest known manuscript, dating back to 1719.  So instead of  two or three arrangements, we get a single, forty-nine-minute succession of movements.  Of course, Guglielmo's players perform on period instruments and adhere as closely as possible to what researchers today consider period-performance practices.  The results in both the Water Music and the Fireworks music are invigorating, but the tempos are never too fast to be breathless.

Still, as I said, nobody gets it quite right.  Contemporary accounts of the première performance of the Water Music describe about fifty players participating and in the Fireworks music about one hundred or more.  The booklet insert lists only seventeen players in the L'Arte dell-Arco, and in the picture of them, there are only a dozen.  So, in terms of sheer size, L'Arte dell-Arco can't match the sheer numbers Handel had at his disposal for the inaugural presentations of these works.  But as Guglielmo says, most subsequent performances and most court orchestras did not employ anywhere near these numbers, so Guglielmo's small group can get away with reasonably imitating Handel on a less grand scale.

And, naturally, there is a upside to a small ensemble:  They sound more transparent than a big orchestra would.  This CPO recording is clear, clean, and dynamic, the sonics among the better I've heard in these works.  The CPO engineers capture the band in a spacious auditorium that makes them sound like a bigger group than they are, while at the same time not beclouding the acoustics in any way.  What's more, for listeners equipped with multichannel SACD playback, the disc is a hybrid CD/SACD, playable in 2.0 or 5.1 channels in SACD and 2.0 channels on a regular CD player.  I compared the playback of the two-channel stereo tracks in CD and SACD and couldn't hear much difference, but, then, I didn't have access to two separate players and two separate discs for instant comparisons.  In the thirty seconds or so it took to change disc layers, I may have forgotten any differences there may have been.

In any case, good, lively performances on period instruments and good, lucid sound make this disc a contender.

JJP