Handel: Royal Fireworks Music

Handel’s Fireworks music, which helped start a conflagration and a crowd panic at its premiere in 1749, is still inspiring conductors to extravagant displays. Stokowski plays it with an orchestra of 125 and the final chords overlaid with the boom and hiss of exploding rockets; Mackerras with a band of nine percussion and sixty-four wind instruments, including twenty-six oboes and fourteen bassoons, which are said to be the numbers called for in the original scoring. Both recordings, for all their spirit, are thick-textured and noisy. Szell’s, with no count given on the oboes and bassoons, fits more snugly into domestic surroundings. Both the Szell and Stokowski records predictably offer the Water Music on the reverse; Mackerras chooses Handel’s Concerto No. 2 in F for Two Wind Choirs and Strings.