Sunday Classics flashback: We've got leftover Handel "Water Music"

Here's something different: the Air from the Water Music played by the Gateway Brass Quintet (Dan Smith and Robert Souza, trumpets; Cheryl Hoard, horn; Tom Vincent, trombone; Jeff Hoard, tuba), recorded at St. Anthony of Padua, St. Louis, Feb. 21, 2009. I didn't say good, mind you, just different.

by Ken

In last week's Royal Fireworks Music preview, Water Music preview, and main post devoted to both, I wound up with some musical leftovers. Having decided to give attention to the once-standard but now-widely-scorned suites arranged by Sir Hamilton Harty, I wound up with more samples than I used.

Basically we've got two "extra" versions of the Handel-Harty Water Music Suite. In the end, for an up-to-date stereo version, I didn't have to choose between the Szell/LSO recording I used and a rather different but equally lovely one by William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony, because it turned out that while I'd brought the jewel case for the CD that included the Steinberg performance home, I'd left the disc itself at the office. So we're going to hear that tonight.

Then, for a performance a bit more like the older-fashioned ones closer in spirit to Sir Hamilton's time, I produced my own digital rendering, a hybrid actually, from two LPs: the first four movements from Sir Malcolm Sargent's stereo recording with the Royal Philharmonic, which I had to complete, owing to intractable LP-surface problems, with two movements from Eugene Ormandy's stereo recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra, not of the Harty suite but of his own similar one. And after all that I wound up not using my hybrid creation!

Partly this was because I chose not to attempt a grand defense of the Harty arrangement. Now this certainly isn't the only way I would want to hear the Water Music. In part this is because the arrangement locks in certain performance choices that are totally defensible but not necessarily something one wants to have made part of the basic performing text. In part too this is because much wonderful music is left out -- but then, nobody's figured out a really effective way to present all that music. The Harty suite makes for a lovely presentation of the music that's included, and I would certainly rather hear it this way than in most of what currently pass for fetishistically "authentic" performances that show substantially less understanding of the music. So this week we're going to hear those additional versions of the "arranged" suites.

Plus, we've got a bonus!


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