Georg Friedrich Händel was one of the greatest composers of the Baroque period. Opera dominated Handel’s career, yet he was better known for his oratorios and instrumental works for several centuries. He forged a personal idiom by taking Italian traditions and adding elements of German counterpoint and dance forms from France. The result was a uniquely cosmopolitan style which, when Handel took it to London, would expand to embrace the musical legacy of the English Restoration composer Henry Purcell. Discover a compilation of famous Handel works featuring masterpieces by the great composer and wonderful musicians.

With Water & Fire, B’Rock Orchestra and Dmitry Sinkovsky present Handel’s Water Music alongside his Music for the Royal Fireworks. Both spectacular works were written for royal open-air ceremonies, and may well have been drowned out by the noise of pyrotechnics and the waves of the Thames. Still, after Handel’s lifetime, they quickly became audience favourites. B’Rock performs these captivating suites with an ensemble that approaches the ca. 50 musicians that Handel originally employed, conveying the pomp and splendour of the occasion while also highlighting the coloristic richness and refinement of the score.

CantoLX, B'Rock Orchesta and conductor Frank Agsteribbe present Antwerp Requiem c. 1650, an album showcasing the exceptional wealth of musical life in Antwerp in the age of Rubens. Philippus van Steelant's recently-rediscovered Requiem settings are unique in their exuberant splendour, tied to a funerary culture that embraced the glory of life.

cantoLX, B’Rock Orchesta and conductor Frank Agsteribbe present Antwerp Requiem c. 1650, an album showcasing the exceptional wealth of musical life in Antwerp in the age of Rubens. Philippus van Steelant’s recently-rediscovered Requiem settings are unique in their exuberant splendour, tied to a funerary culture that embraced the glory of life.

Multiple prize-winning conductor René Jacobs and the B’Rock Orchestra complete their Schubert cycle on Pentatone with the composer’s two most famous symphonies, the Unfinished and Great. In his extensive liner notes, Jacobs develops a theory that the B Minor Symphony did not remain “unfinished”, but was deliberately left unfinished, because Schubert shaped its two movements in analogy to Mein Traum (My Dream), an autobiographical narration in two parts, written in 1822, simultaneous to the creation of the symphony. While the first half of Mein Traum tells about his mother’s decease and his problematic relationship to his father, the second part enters a magical, Romantic realm, and eventually brings a reconciliation with his father.

Multiple prize-winning conductor René Jacobs and the B’Rock Orchestra present the third instalment of their Schubert cycle on PENTATONE with a recording of the composer’s Fourth and Fifth Symphony. Just as with the Second and Third, Jacobs approaches these works as a symphonic pair, revealing contrasting aspects of Schubert’s personality and compositional approach. The Fourth is Schubert’s first symphony in a minor key, and adumbrates a totally new harmonic worldview that Dvořák associated with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. On the contrary, the Fifth sounds Mozartian and cheerful, although that light-heartedness is only an appearance, as is so often the case in Schubert’s music. In the composer’s words, “too light a mind usually harbours a heart that is too heavy!” Looking closer beneath the surface, the cross-relations between the “Tragic” Fourth and “lighter” Fifth become all the more evident. The players of the B’Rock Orchestra present these works on period instruments; transparent, but full of fire.