Handel

With Water & Fire, B’Rock Orchestra and Dmitry Sinkovsky present Handel’s Water Music alongside his Music for the Royal Fireworks. Both spectacular works were written for royal open-air ceremonies, and may well have been drowned out by the noise of pyrotechnics and the waves of the Thames. Still, after Handel’s lifetime, they quickly became audience favourites. B’Rock performs these captivating suites with an ensemble that approaches the ca. 50 musicians that Handel originally employed, conveying the pomp and splendour of the occasion while also highlighting the coloristic richness and refinement of the score.

Although Israel in Egypt was first performed on 4 April 1739 in tripartite form, Handel probably first composed this oratorio without a complete text. Hervé Niquet has chosen to record the version in two parts that Berlioz and the whole of the 19th century considered definitive, these being the Exodus and the Song of Moses. Produced just after the Covid pandemic, this recording also shows the joy of Le Concert Spirituel’s singers and instrumentalists at making music together again: Hervé Niquet says the final chorus "is a cry of happiness in unison" and sees an "almost palpable drama in these works: the two choruses face each other on either side of the orchestra and respond to each other in violent retaliations and monumental unisons. Their interweaving in diabolical movements is like a theatrical staging before our very eyes.”

Brahms' works for piano open and close his career as a composer. In his earliest sets of variations, especially those of Op. 9, the melody is of primary importance, and Brahms clings to it while freely changing the harmony. His later studies of Beethoven, however, led to his transformation of the melody into something new, adhering to the theme's basic phrase structure and harmonic pattern. As had Bach in his "Goldberg" Variations and Beethoven in the "Diabelli" Variations, Brahms, in the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Händel, Op. 24, constructed a sprawling masterwork ……..