A second solo album and a second Gramophone ’Editor’s Choice’ award. Widely acclaimed as a benchmark recording.
The six recorder sonatas were composed in London, during the period 1724 - 1726, when Handel was enjoying a prolific period and huge success. He was producing a feast of grand Italian operas - Giulio Cesare (1724) Rodelinda (1725), Scipione (1726) to name but a few - for his company The Royal Academy of Music. He was writing florid show-stopping arias for his star singers and producing glowing orchestral scores ripe with the fruits of his musical imagination.
With his creative juices flowing, even the humble recorder (which had been the instrument of choice for the gentleman amateur in England since the end of the previous century) received a collection of sonatas lovingly crafted by a composer at the height of his powers.
Many of Handel’s large scale operatic and orchestral works call upon the recorder (or pair of recorders) to play for a few choice moments, usually to represent the pastoral idyll, matters spiritual or during a love scene. The oboists or flautists in the band would have been called upon to pick up a recorder for the relevant aria or movement. Indeed they would have been expected to be more than proficient on perhaps two or three wind instruments. It is not difficult to imagine that one of these players - the leading concert performers of their day - may have asked for, or been given these sonatas to perform in the intervals of theatre or operatic performances or in one of the new concert venues that were springing up in London.
The recorder sonatas are a distillation of many of Handel’s favourite melodic and rhetorical devices. As a master craftsman he was able to take ideas from large-scale works and recreate elements of oratorio, concerto, operatic aria and orchestral suites in perfectly crafted pocket book form.
It is perhaps not surprising then, that he should use these particular pieces as models to teach figured bass to Princess Anne (daughter of George II) and then later to John Christopher Smith, the son of his copyist. It is because of these lessons that we have Handel’s fair copies with meticulously figured bass parts for the A minor, F major, C major and G minor sonatas to work from.