Concerti grossi, Op. 6 (Handel)

Despite the conventional model, Handel incorporated in the movements the full range of his compositional styles, including trio sonatas, operatic arias, French overtures, Italian sinfonias, airs, fugues, themes and variations and a variety of dances.

Henceforth, with the exception of Giove in Argo (1739), Imeneo (1740) and Deidamia (1741), he abandoned Italian opera in favour of the English oratorio, a new musical genre that he was largely responsible for creating.

The year 1739 saw the first performance of his great oratorio Saul, his setting of John Dryden's Ode for St Cecilia's Day and the revival of his pastoral English opera or serenata Acis and Galatea.

There were just over 100 subscribers, including members of the royal family, friends, patrons, composers, organists and managers of theatres and pleasure-gardens, some of whom bought multiple sets for larger orchestral forces.

Despite being fugal in nature, it does not adhere to the strict rules of counterpoint, surprising the listener instead with ingenious episodes, alternating between the ripieno and concertino; at the close, where a bold restatement of the theme would be expected, Handel playfully curtails the movement with two pianissimo bars.

It alternates between two different moods: in the stately largo sections the full orchestra and solo violins respond in successive bars with incisive dotted rhythms; the larghetto, andante e piano at a slightly quicker speed in repeated quavers, is gentle and mysterious with harmonic complexity created by suspensions in the inner parts.

6, it comes the closest to Vivaldi's concerto writing, with its stern opening unison ritornello; however, despite a clear difference in texture between the solo violin sections and the orchestral tuttis, Handel breaks from the model by sharing material between both groups.

The final short allegro, ma non troppo in 68 time brings the concerto back to E minor and a more serious mood, with chromaticism and unexpected key changes in the dialogue between concertino and ripieno.

Although there are unmistakable elements of wit in the imaginative development, the prevalent mood is serious: the sustained melodic interludes in the upper strings are tinged by unexpected flattened notes.

The opening of this piece always impressed me with the idea of its being the most spirited and characteristic of all the music written by Handel, or any other composer, on Lulli's model of Opera Overture; which seems to require a convulsive, deliberate and military craft ...

It incorporates in its first, second and sixth movements reworked versions of the three-movement overture to Handel's Ode for St Cecilia's Day HWV 76 (Larghetto, e staccato – allegro – minuet), composed in 1739 immediately prior to the Op.

Handel, however, treats the material in a wholly original way: the virtuoso movement is full of purpose with an unmistakable sense of direction, as the discords between the upper parts ineluctably resolve themselves.

The autograph manuscript contains the sketch for a gavotte in two parts, which, possibly in order to restore an imbalance created by the length of the musette and its different key (E♭ major), Handel abandoned in favour of two new shorter allegro movements.

The first movement, marked Larghetto e affetuoso, is one of the darkest that Handel wrote, with a tragic pathos that easily equals that of the finest dramatic arias in his opera seria.

Despite momentary suggestions of modulations to the relative major key, the music sinks back towards the prevailing melancholic mood of G minor; at the sombre close, the strings descend to the lowest part of their register.

The elegiac musette in E♭ major is the crowning glory of the concerto, praised by the contemporary commentator Charles Burney, who described how Handel would often perform it as a separate piece during oratorios.

Like the similarly popular aria Son confusa pastorella from Act III of Handel's opera Poro re dell'Indie (1731), it was inspired by Telemann's Harmonischer Gottes Dienst.

The movement divides into four parts: first a statement of the theme from the full orchestra; then a continuation and extension of this material as a dialogue between concertino and ripieno strings, with the typical dotted rhythms of the musette; then a section for full orchestra in C minor with semiquaver passage-work for violins over the rhythms of the original theme in the lower strings; and finally a shortened version of the dialogue from the second section to conclude the work.

The first movement is a largo, ten bars long, which like an overture leads into the allegro fugue on a single note, that only a composer of Handel's stature would have dared to attempt.

The central expressive largo in G minor and 34 time, reminiscent of the style of Bach, is harmonically complex, with a chromatic theme and closely woven four-part writing.

The following brief adagio, melancholy and expressive, would have been instantly recognized by Handel's audience as starting with a direct quotation from Cleopatra's aria Piangerò la sorte mia from Act III of his popular opera Giulio Cesare (1724).

The siciliana is similar in style to those Handel wrote for his operas, always marking moments of tragic pathos; one celebrated example is the soprano-alto duet Son nata a lagrimar for Sesto and Cornelia at the end of act 1 of Giulio Cesare.

... the Symphony, or introduction, of the andante is extremely pleasing; and no less remarkable for its grace, than the boldness with which the composer, in order to bring in the answers to points of imitation, has used double discords, unprepared.

It incorporates the features of a Venetian concerto: the brilliant virtuosic episodes or solo violin alternate with the four-bar orchestral ritornello, which Handel varies on each reprise.

Here the permanent inspiration of Italy rises in all the freshness of his youth, with the added weight and gravity of years, to produce one of those tunes that speak to every degree and level of musical experience.

The arresting dotted rhythms of the opening largo recall the dramatic style of the French overture, although the movement also serves to contrast the full orchestra with the quieter ripieno strings.

With its quiet gravity, it is similar to the andante larghetto, sometimes referred to as the "minuet", in the overture to the opera Berenice, which Charles Burney described as "one of the most graceful and pleasing movements that has ever been composed".

Nor did I ever know such business done in so short a time; that movement contains but thirty-four bars, and yet nothing seems left unsaid; and though it begins with so much pride and haughtiness, it melts at last into softness; and, where it modulates into a minor key, seems to express fatigue, languor and fainting.Handel's twelve grand concertos were already available to the public through Walsh's 1740 solo organ arrangements of four of them and through the various editions of the full Opus 6 produced during Handel's lifetime.

There are piano duet versions by August Horn (1839–1893), Salamon Jadassohn (1831–1902), Wilhelm Kempff, Richard Kleinmichel (1846–1941), Ernst Naumann (1832–1910), Adolf Rutthardt (1849–1934), F. L. Schubert (1804–1868) and Ludwig Stark (1831–1884).

[28] In the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg, a composer openly antipathetic to Handel but at a turning point in his musical career, "freely arranged" the Concerto Grosso, Op.