This seems a slightly old-fashioned record. With so many Handel overtures available nowadays, in their proper contexts, a selection of this sort is less needed than it once was. And the playing, untouched by changes in baroque performance style, is much as one would have expected 20 years ago: the French overtures hushed on their repeats, and a good deal of arbitrary re-orchestration, with oboes taking over the string parts in the fugues and in some of the repeats of the dances (and occasional solo violin passages too): Handel knew what he was doing and would have asked for this if he wanted it, and in fact he does at certain appropriate moments in the ballet pieces.
We hear selections of the ballets in the first two operas, with some of the dances neatly characterized and the dream music from Alcina done with plenty of vitality. But a few, such as one of the musettes in Ariodante, are rhythmically dull, and the use of notes inegales, arguably misplaced anyway, is routine and unimaginative in one of the rondeau movements. Similarly, the lovely minuet from the Berenice Overture is staid and shapeless. The first parts of the French overtures are well paced, the dotted rhythms done with spirit; but in the fast movements, fugues and dances alike, the tempos tend to be decidedly on the quick side, once or twice uncomfortably so, and there is a hint of instability in the ''Arrival of the Queen of Sheba''. An agreeable record but in no way a distinguished one.'