Handel: Water Music, Suite from Il Pastor Fido
Tafelmusik, Jeanne Lamon, conductor (Sony Classical).
Leave it to our neighbors to the north to show us how high performing standards have climbed with historically informed recordings of Baroque music over the past two decades. Here the redoubtable Canadian period-instruments ensemble offers a complete performance of the most famous piece of maritime music ever written, and it goes immediately to the top of the list.
Lamon’s musicians adopt basically brisk tempos within which their sprung rhythms, crisp accents and elegant phrasings allow the music to speak with a naturalness and flow Handel would have applauded. The voicings are always clear in a way so many “authentic” British early-music groups, with their staid, heavier textures, can’t seem to match. It need hardly be added that the playing is of superior quality throughout, with particularly winning contributions from the horns and principal oboe.
Tafelmusik presents an unusual version of the score that mixes the movements of the D Major and G Major suites rather than playing the three suites–F, D and G–straight through. This seems a perfectly defensible practice, since no manuscript exists. Sony finds room to include an equally infectious account of a suite of dances from “Pastor Fido.” First-class engineering.
