This is a strange record. Handel's publisher, John Walsh, issued during the 1740s a harpsichord arrangement of the Water Music; it was a customary procedure at the time—as it long continued to be—to publish popular pieces in arrangements that made them more accessible and at the same time turned an honest few pennies for the publisher and possibly the composer. Unless one is so besotted with historicism as to want to hear a beautiful orchestral score in an arid harpsichord arrangement purely to reproduce the experience of Georgian domestic music-making, there is no more reason for listening to it than, say, to a Verdi opera with a piano reduction of the orchestral part. In fact, the present record will not even please our manic historicist. Its propagators felt that the single-harpsichord version was ''not wholly satisfactory from the musician's point of view'' (and that is true enough), so to remedy it they have arranged the arrangement for two harpsichords. This does, as they claim, restore some of the harmonic richness, and it also gives scope for appropriate antiphonal effects. But the result in general is of limited interest, to put it kindly and not only because of the playing itself. Technically it is secure, though I find the constant 'spreading' of chords (to increase the sonority) wearisome and predictable. Rhythmically, it is very mannered, with curious little hesitations of a kind quite apt to Rameau dances, for example, but foreign to Handel and destructive of his rhythmic breadth. Some of the ornamentation is well judged, but often its execution is dully mechanical (listen to the very opening, the treatment of trills in the overture).
There seem to be quite a lot of odd decisions about the text, not only in the composition of the extra harpsichord part but also in the choice of repeats and the performance of some movements twice over in different keys. The sleeve-note is full of inaccuracies and misconceptions. In all, a record exclusively for the collector with a passion for the absurd.'