Vauxhall Gardens was a popular attraction among fashionable society in early Georgian London – but there is seldom precise information about exactly what musical programmes were performed on any given evening. For her second volume exploring the possibilities, harpsichordist Bridget Cunningham (aided by scholar David E Coke) achieves a healthy balance between presenting the fruits of research and creative programming. The band of London Early Opera plays Handel’s seldom-heard Hornpipe in D major, composed especially for Vauxhall in 1740, and also gives a tasteful account of the Concerto grosso in A minor, Op 6 No 4.

Bona fide Vauxhall music by Boyce (the aptly named ‘Spring Gardens’) and Lampe (‘The Farewel to Vaux Hall’) are both sung ardently by Greg Tassell. Two songs by the obscure Thomas Gladwin are perspicuous ballads on lightweight subject matter. Other songs of a similar ilk without specific connections to Vauxhall are John Stanley’s ‘The Power of Music and Beauty’ (its sentimentality caught perfectly by Mary Bevan) and Handel’s patriotic ‘From scourging rebellion’ (composed at around the time of Butcher Culloden’s victory over the second Jacobite Rebellion; two of its verses are omitted, for which the tenors might be grateful on account of its deceptive technical difficulty and chronic poetry).

It is less plausible that Vauxhall witnessed performances of Handel’s three songs and a trio composed in 1745 for the Earl of Gainsborough’s family to perform at their Rutland estate as part of a domestic production of Milton’s masque Comus – but its first recording since Hogwood’s premiere version (L’Oiseau-Lyre, 8/82) is warmly welcome, and Claire Bessent’s lovely ‘There sweetest flowers of mingled hue’ is amply worth the price of admission.