This recording of
Handel's recorder sonatas by the blind English player
Alan Davis seems aimed at specialists in the music of the eighteenth century; there's a lot of discussion in the booklet about the history of the recorder and about the edition history of
Handel's sonatas. Yet it's a fine, lively encounter with
Handel's music for any listener, with a great sense of how to impart forward drive to his music without introducing anachronistic Romantic interpretive ideas. Does an hour of recorder music (plus 20 minutes for solo harpsichord at the end) seem like a lot to you? Think of it as being like a human voice rather than like a flute-in-the-process-of-development.
Davis is quite an expressive player with a wonderful sense of the long lines and pastoral mood in
Handel's slow movements and a way of articulating the fast movements so as to create the terraced levels of sound of the Italian sonata within the limitations of the recorder's two octaves of tones. A pleasure for anyone who ever picked up a recorder in a school music class or whose
Handel collection lacks these works, which were very popular in their own time.