These are spirited, uplifting performances of the most popular of Handel’s orchestral works, played on period instruments about a semitone below the normal pitch of today. None of the reservations that follow should detract from this overall recommendation.

On July 17, 1717 – 7/7/1717, but presumably not significant – King George I held a party on the Thames, the royal barge proceeding from Whitehall to Chelsea. Among a host of other boats was a barge containing some 50 instrumentalists, who delighted the king with a performance of Handel’s Water Music. The piece is best known in the form of three suites, arranged by key, in a tradition dating from the 1950s. However, that the Water Music was conceived as a continuous composition was confirmed by the recent rediscovery by the scholar Terence Best of a contemporary manuscript that predates all other sources. Dmitry Sinkovsky seems to have used the edition that Best subsequently produced: following, for instance, the sequence of movements and the instructions for varied instrumentation in some of the repeats. The odd thing is that the pieces are still grouped into suites, and in the wrong order. To recover the putative original (it’s not known if all the pieces were played) you need to programme the tracks thus: 6 15, 1 5, 16 21.

The disc opens grandly with the first two movements of ‘Suite No 2’, the silvery trumpets and golden horns shining bright. It’s hardly likely that there would have been keyboard instruments on the barge, but the continuo includes a harpsichord and an organ, mostly inaudible: the former provides a weedy link between the movements just mentioned, while the organ helps out – really not necessary – in the strings-only Menuet (track 18). One or two quirks aside, which might pall on repeated hearings, Sinkovsky conducts stylishly: on the fast side, but not unreasonably so. According to Best, the wind instrument on tracks 19 and 20 should be a descant recorder; Sinkovsky deploys what sounds like a piccolo. Timpani and percussion including a tambourine are added: sometimes obtrusively, as in the passages for solo horns in the Allegro (track 10) preceding the famous Air.

The recording of the Fireworks Music does not replicate the enormous forces of the first performance in Green Park on April 27, 1749, despite the implication on the back cover; some doubling of the woodwind and brass would have been welcome. Even without the extra players, though, the Overture – at over seven minutes much the longest piece on the disc – comes across splendidly. The braying of the brass, the keen but never acid oboes, the fleetness of the strings: all are a delight from first to last. But if you are in reflective mood, the flautist on track 3 (sadly unnamed, the instrument unlisted) will transport you to the serenity of the Elysian Fields in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.