Trying to outcrazy the remnants of rain-filled storm Florence by playing Handel’s Water Music at her, with the volume cranked up this afternoon. Think it might be working... the sun is finally starting to peek out.
The Water Music was written in response to a request by King George I for a concert on the river Thames back in 1717. I’m just hoping it helps keep the western headwaters of the Delaware River system in banks this weeks all these 301 years later.
No clue what Handel may have thought of a French group ever having at his works... but I like it fine, so below is embedded the audio of Suite 2 in D Major from the Water Music as performed by the Jean-François Paillard Chamber Orchestra.
Noted in passing: The late conductor Paillard was who brought “Pachelbel’s Canon” from dusty shelves of middle Baroque sheet music to daylight again in 1968, ornamenting it with some
ad libitum insertions found so welcome by performers that they were eventually treated as
obligato and the work is rarely heard without those parts today. The canon topped “classical” charts in the late 1970s, and if you haven’t heard it played somewhere then truly you’ve been living in a cave devoid of movies, TV shows, ads, intros to audiobooks and God knows what else. The last of the great middle Baroque South German composers, Pachelbel apparently didn’t have much influence on Handel, who was born in Germany but became a naturalized British citizen and whose works reflected more the northern German and Italian Baroque styles.
