Handel’s Fireworks Music, written for a celebration in Green Park in 1749 to mark the Peace of Aix la Chapelle, is an appropriate choice for a concert during the Bonfire Night weekend. He originally wrote it for a gargantuan wind band including 24 oboes and 12 bassoons, though he later added strings, making it his most sumptuously scored orchestral work, rarely performed with period instruments.

The sparkling and delicate Water Music suite is an excellent foil to the Fireworks Music. It was Handel’s first extended piece of orchestral music, written to accompany George I’s outing on the Thames in the royal barge in 1717, and has been popular ever since, though it is rarely performed using the original sequence of movements, only recently established by scholars.

The programme is completed by Handel’s Concerto Grosso in A minor, one of the incomparable op. 6 concertos not included in our very successful Handel concert last November.