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This week Donald Macleod focuses on Handel the organist. Today, as London audiences lose interest in Italian opera, oratorio - with tailor-made organ concerti - is where it’s at.

Handel - not just a great composer but an astute businessman too - got into oratorio at precisely the right time. Since the late 1720s, the London public’s appetite for opera in Italian had been on a downward trajectory. Then in 1733, a rival company - the Opera of the Nobility - set itself up in direct competition to Handel, making the Italian-opera pound even harder to earn. Handel’s return to oratorio began with what might have been a one-off revival of a fifteen-year-old work, Esther, to mark his 47th birthday. But when, a couple of months later, a ‘pirate’ performance of the same piece was put on without his permission, Handel recaptured the initiative by quickly mounting a new, substantially revised version. It was a great success, which he followed up first with Acis and Galatea - an English revision of his Italian oratorio Aci, Galatea e Polifemo - and then with a new oratorio, Deborah. From this accidental sequence of events, the English oratorio tradition was born – along with the organ concerto, which Handel introduced to beef up the evening’s entertainment to match the experience of an evening at the opera. In Alexander's Feast, or The Power of Musick, the concerti – for organ and harp – are actually integrated into the narrative.

Cecilia, volgi un sguardo, HWV 89 (No 8, ‘Tra amplessi innocenti’, extract)
Jennifer Smith, soprano
John Elwes, tenor
The English Concert
Trevor Pinnock, conductor

Concerto Grosso in C, HWV 318 (Alexander's Feast)
Collegium Musicum 90
Simon Standage, conductor

Harp Concerto in B flat, Op 4 No 6 (HWV 294)
Frances Kelly, harp
Brandenburg Consort
Roy Goodman, conductor

Alexander's Feast; or, The Power of Musick, HWV 75 (Pt 2, No 25: ‘Thus, long ago, 'ere heaving Bellows learned to blow’)
Anthony Rolfe Johnson, tenor
Stockholm Bach Choir
Concentus Musicus Wien
Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor

Organ Concerto in G minor, Op 4 No 1 (HWV 289)
Ton Koopman, organ and direction
Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra

Producer: Chris Barstow