When my teacher discussed Handel's Water Music with me, more years ago than I care to remember, he was talking about the lugubrious arrangement by Sir Hamilton Harty, often played at that time. With his own orchestra, he had chosen much faster speeds, and the strings were delighted to find that, in the famous Air, they really had a tune to play. It is now many years since I heard the Handel/Harty version. Naturally, it was the livelier approach that was adopted by the English Classical Players, conducted by Jonathan Brett, at the start of this concert of early 18th-Century music.

It has also become normal to use only a small orchestra, as on this occasion. There were some two dozen musicians on the platform, with a harpsichord to support the harmony. In the excellent acoustics of this hall, one could hear every note. The rhythmically varied slow movement was particularly effective. The first performance, heard by King George I in 1717, much as he liked Handel's inventive suite (he would have heard many more movements than time allows in a modern concert), would have been much more confused, with fifty assorted instruments playing on boats on the Thames!

The concert included two oboe concertos in which Malcolm Messiter was the accomplished soloist. The first was by Albinoni, in D minor. The oboe part called for sustained and exposed decorative passages - longer, it seemed, than any human being could have breath for! His ambitious decorations were a delight, and he was charmingly modest when the orchestra, briefly, took the limelight. The other concerto, after the interval, was by the less well known Marcello. It was not the fault of Messiter, nor of the conductor, that this was an anticlimax.

The towering figure in this programme (with due respect to Handel) was Johann Sebastian Bach, with two works, of which the more memorable, before the interval, was the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, in D major. As often at this period, there is a small group of soloists, the concertino: in this work, flute (Kate Hill), violin (Alison Kelly) and harpsichord (Harold Lester) (the rest of the small orchestra forms the ripieno). Most of us have rarely heard a harpsichord in this hall; it was not a large instrument, but in these acoustics it was perfectly audible and the balance with the ripieno was right. Lester's playing was heard to advantage in the famous solo, and the audience listened breathless and spellbound.

It is said that this was Bach's first use of the transverse flute rather than the recorder, but in Bach's time it would have been a wooden flute with a conical bore and almost no keys. It would have had a less brilliant tone than the modern silver flute played by Kate Hill: she tended to overshadow the violin in the concertino, when the three instruments should be in equal partnership. With this reservation, it was an exciting and well judged performance. By comparison, the last work, Bach's Orchestral Suite in C major, though well played and enjoyable, was less substantial.

Graham Mordue