Quite a few performances of Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks have been done on historical instruments, but this one by French conductor
Hervé Niquet and his ensemble
Le Concert Spirituel confidently bills itself as the "first historical version," with the claim justified by reference to "original instrumentation and tuning." The whole thing is quite an ambitious rethinking of the work, partly undertaken to mark the 15th anniversary of
Le Concert Spirituel (everybody gets together and sings "Joyeux Anniversaire" at the end).
Niquet takes the instrumentation of the work as something that would have been invigorating and even a bit shocking in its own time, and he links the work to the tradition of outdoor music that extended back into the Renaissance. For all his concern with authenticity, he doesn't try to match the ensemble of about 50 musicians that observers reported seeing as part of King George I's famous river excursion of 1717; he doubles it, using a group of about 100, with 24 oboists and a large component of brasses.
Niquet doesn't explain this decision, but his aim seems to be to create interpretations that are big in every way. The natural brasses rousingly dominate the music wherever they appear, and in the Ouverture to the Royal Fireworks Music (tracks 19 and 20) they create music that really could be used in place of the 1812 Overture for a modern fireworks spectacular, surely the first time this has happened on a historical-performance release. In Water Music, the massed instruments overlay Handel's dances with huge blocks of sound, the strings emerging basically only when the brasses and winds are silent. The piece has never been played like this, but the engineering creates a startling facsimile of outdoor performance (the Metz Arsenal was an inspired choice of location) and makes it easy even for the casual listener to imagine what the king was so excited about when he demanded that the musicians repeat the whole thing. As for tuning,
Niquet reasons from the fact that using the hand to modify the pitches of natural brass instruments is a modern development; they were manufactured with meantone tuning, and they thus "imposed" that tuning on the rest of the ensemble. This necessitated the kind of logistical effort that you just don't see much anymore: 24 oboes were made to order, with meantone tuning and other historical details. The brasses may seem to be coming in out of tune at first, but the ear adjusts to the new sound world before long. Certainly this is a Water Music that will knock you out of your seat. It's not for a quiet garden party unless your party is happening on a boat, where it'll stand up to the noise and more. It is a startling reimagining of a work encrusted with two and a half centuries of tradition. Bring on the
Niquet Messiah!