Well, I have no short­age of record­ings of this, one of the most pop­u­lar works of baroque music. I have per­for­mances con­duct­ed by Fen­nell, Gar­diner, Hog­wood, Mar­riner, Maier, Pin­nock, Savall, Stokows­ki, and War­chal, and I’ve prob­a­bly heard a dozen oth­ers. Most lis­ten­ers divide them into two cat­e­gories: 1) record­ings using orig­i­nal peri­od instru­ments, or an approx­i­ma­tion there­of; 2) record­ings using twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry instru­ments in a stan­dard con­cert for­mat. I’m not going to sneer at the lat­ter group. Han­del was as prag­mat­ic a show­man as music ever pro­duced, and he would have been per­fect­ly hap­py hear­ing Stokowski’s won­der­ful and total­ly inau­then­tic ver­sion, though he might have told Mar­riner to give his per­for­mance a lit­tle more zetz. But on the whole, I pre­fer the peri­od instru­ment ver­sions, and of those, I’d pick Jor­di Saval­l’s for my desert island music col­lec­tion. This ver­sion has zetz-aplen­ty. Read more »