Water Music Telemann – Vivaldi – Haendel

The Water Music has ensured Handel’s posthumous fame, firing listeners’ imaginations with its alteration of fast and slow movements, by turns incisive and gentle. First performed in 1717, when Handel had recently settled in London, the Water Music was intended to enliven the court’s boat-trip on the Thames and the banquet after its arrival at Chelsea.

This ‘must” of the Baroque repertoire is joined on the programme by a suite by Telemann evoking Thetis, Neptune and Aeolus, and Vivaldi’s dazzingly virtuosic violin concerto La Tempest di mare, n°5 of Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione op.8.