You will notice rather a lot of 'recons.' or 'arr.' in the heading. That is because in eighteenth-century England, when keyboard concertos were published, generally only the keyboard part was printed—or, when the instrumental parts were, they were issued in such small quanities that they have rarely survived. The solo part usually included a reduction of the tuttis, so that one person could play through the work in a domestic context (the idea is not absurd; Bach carried it just one stage further in his Italian Concerto).
Of the reconstructions, the Roseingrave is the most conjectural, but the result is plausible even if the music itself is rather thin and primitive. The next three items all date from the end of the 1750s and the 1760s. The work by Thomas Chilcot, organist at Bath Abbey, is charming, with some agreeable and graceful invention and a wistful, pathetic minor-key slow movement. The piece by James Nares, organist at York Minster and St Paul's, published (oddly, in score rather than parts) as a sonata rather than a concerto, is a curious compromise between the two genres, with sonata-like binary forms but concerto-like ritornellos within them. Musically it is not specially distinctive, but the elaborate keyboard writing in the Adagio gives Paul Nicholson an opportunity to show the neatness and clarity of his articulation, and he shows too some virtuosity in the finale, a delightful musette with variations.
The concerto by Philips Hayes, Professor at Oxford University, is again very elegantly written, rather short-breathed in its ideas, but with a Grazioso slow movement of extreme simplicity but true sincerity of expression; it ends with a set of variations, not much post-Handel in style (like Op. 6 No. 12, for example), and a shade repetitive, but it makes a pleasant enough finale. These three pieces, all tuneful and unaffected in style, modest in scale and and with a gentle vein of sentiment (in the eighteenth-century sense), typify English music of this era: no one could mistake them for German or Italian. And the same goes for James Hook's concerto, probably of 1771, although its first movement uses the full classical model that we know from Mozart; but its Andante is simply a song-like melody on the piano, mostly with pizzicato accompaniment, which threatens to become bland but admits some chromatic touches just in time, and it ends with a jolly, pseudo-Scots rondo. There is plenty more of Hook that is worth reviving. And there are more good English concertos, too, that might have earned a place here—Arne's, of course (which this group have already recorded), and those by Stanley and Avison, whose music does not deserve its present neglect.
The Handel items here are the familiar harpsichord chaconne, with string parts, which may have been a part of the original conception (though not, I would think, in quite the form of this reconstruction; the clues are scanty), and the original version of the magnificent opening movement of the Op. 7 No. 4 Concerto, calling for two organs, which if anything is even nobler and more sombre in this form. With accomplished playing from Nicholson, and the usual sense of involvement and enthusiasm from the orchestra, this disc is well worth trying, especially for the way its represents the particular flavour of English music just after the middle of the eighteenth century.'