A curious appendix in a couple of the Handel Gesellschaft volumes offers ornamental harpsichord arrangements by William Babell of airs from Handel operas. He in fact published a large number of versions of extracts from popular operas of the time, and these gained wide circulation both in this country and abroad in collections aimed at genteel young ladies (for whom a modest competence at the keyboard was a social asset). The transcriptions from Handel's Rinaldo (1711) are so elaborately smothered in brilliant scales, arpeggios and other embellishments that Hawkins averred that ''few could play the lessons but himself'', and Burney acidly commented that Babell ''acquired great celebrity without the assistance of taste''; but the versions of works by other composers that had been produced in London in 1709 and 1710 are much less ornate and were clearly designed for players of modest attainments.
Jane Chapman presents a score of these curiosities on a fine Kirckman harpsichord of 1766 fitted with a 'crescendo' pedal, which she uses with effect in the extraordinary fantasia on ''Vo far guerra'' (complete with coruscating cadenza). Also from Rinaldo here are the overture (strangely ending in the dominant) and four more arias, of which the immense verve with which ''Bel piacer'' is played is captivating, but of which ''Lascia ch'io pianga'' is much the most famous. There is also a siciliano aria stated to be from Handel's Antiochus, a work of which I have never heard (can anyone enlighten me?) and which sounds very unlike Handel.
It has to be said that five arias from Mancini's Hydaspes (which caused a stir by a mock fight with a lion in its Third Act), two from a Bononcini pasticcio (according to Burney, ''the first opera performed in England wholly in Italian, by Italian singers''), and even two from an English version of Scarlatti's Pirro e Demetrio, are musically less interesting than the pair from Conti's lost Clotildo. But altogether admirable is the vitality with which Jane Chapman here sheds light on early eighteenth-century domestic music-making.
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