Mr Handel’s Dinner
Handel: Concerto for Treble Recorder in F; Dance Suite; Sonata in A minor for Recorder and Continuo, Op. 1 No. 4; Passacaille in G, HWV 399; Trio Sonata in C minor, Op. 2 No. 1a; Keyboard Suite in G – Chaconne; Babell: Concerto for Descant Recorder and Strings in C; Finger: A Ground in D minor for Recorder; Geminiani: Flute Concerto in G La Cetra Barockorchester Basel/ Maurice Steger (recorder)
Harmonia Mundi HMM 902607
76:31 mins
In 2010, recorder virtuoso Maurice Steger brought us the programme Mr Corelli in London; now, nine years on, he serves Mr Handel’s Dinner. Both projects immerse the listener in unfamiliar chamber works of early Georgian London, with the focus on Steger’s strengths as a soloist. But with Mr Handel’s Dinner Steger also directs the band, to less satisfying effect. In giving his facility full reign, Steger compromises expressive depth.
Steger is brilliant when the music is lively. Into his fleetness he mixes zest, charm and impish humour, making you wonder how such artfulness, at such speed and with such nutty dexterity, is humanly possible. For music of Francesco Geminiani – his arrangements of Corelli’s perennially popular Op. 5 violin sonatas – Steger digs out stonking additions by 18th-century violin stars Pietro Castrucci and Matthew Dubourg that have never been recorded. The strutting bravura of this number alone makes Mr Handel’s Dinner stand out.
But this recording also throws Steger’s unease as a lyricist into sharp relief. Where is the heaviness of the Chaconne in the dances from Handel’s Almira which Steger has arranged? Where are nuanced swells on sustained notes, or delicate diminutions to lamenting lines, such as those distinctly called for in Handel’s Larghetto (Flute Sonata HWV 362) or William Babell’s Adagio (Concerto, Op. 3 No. 10)?
The band improvises some of these moves, most audibly in the luminous realisations among plucked strings when Steger isn’t playing. When he is, the performance calls for a kind of composite rating: five stars for the fast movements, but a couple of stars less when the pulse slows.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★