Handel’s Concerti Grossi Through the Lens of Pioneering Modernism
Handel: Concerti Grossi, Op. 6
Boyd Neel Orchestra / Boyd Neel
PEARL GEMM CDS 9164 (recorded 1936–38)
These recordings arrive from another world entirely—not just historically but aesthetically, philosophically, even spiritually distant from our current orthodoxies about Baroque reading. Boyd Neel’s first traversal of Handel’s Concerti Grossi, Op. 6, captured between 1936 and 1938 for Decca, documents a moment when nobody was particularly worried about what Handel himself might have heard. The question then was: what can these works mean to us now?
The answer, it turns out, is both more and less than we might expect.
Neel marshals a small string orchestra of considerable accomplishment—Frederick Grinke, David Martin, and Louis Willoughby among the violinists, James Whitehead and Peter Bevan sharing cello duties. Arnold Goldsborough provides a harpsichord continuo that one can actually hear, a blessed relief after the phantom keyboard contributions on some period recordings. (The contrast with Horszowski’s near-inaudible participation in the Busch set is striking.) These are musicians of real cultivation, and their technical command never falters.
But oh, those tempi. The Larghetto from the G minor Concerto stretches to six minutes—an eternity by any reasonable standard, even by the more indulgent practices of the 1930s. Neel’s string sound here congeals into something closer to Brahms than Handel, the texture thickening until the music nearly loses its capacity to breathe. You can hear the influence of late-Romantic aesthetic values, the assumption that profundity requires a certain gravitational pull, a reluctance to let the music simply dance when it could instead mean something.
Yet the paradox is that when Neel lightens his touch—and he does, inconsistently but revealingly—the results can be genuinely illuminating. His approach to the faster movements shows real rhythmic vitality, even if the string tone remains heavier than we’d now consider appropriate. The solo episodes crackle with personality; Grinke’s playing in particular has an expressive freedom that puts many a more “authentic” modern performance to shame.
The comparison with Busch (also available on Pearl) proves instructive rather than definitive. Busch tends toward the athletic, Neel toward the emphatic. Neither maestro had access to the scholarship that would transform Baroque performance practice in subsequent decades, and both make decisions that sound frankly bizarre to ears trained on Pinnock or Manze. But that’s not quite the point, is it?
What these performances document is an honest attempt to make Handel speak to a particular moment in musical history—the late 1930s, when the string orchestra repertoire was expanding rapidly and conductors were ransacking the past for works that might translate into modern terms. That Neel chose these concertos at all, that he recorded all twelve of them when such projects were rare and expensive, speaks to a kind of missionary zeal that deserves respect.
The sound, as transferred by Pearl, captures the warm glow of pre-war Decca engineering—not transparent by modern standards, but remarkably present given the source material. You hear the scrape of bow on string, the woody resonance of the cellos, the slight edge when the violins reach for higher positions. These are real people making real music in real time, and the occasional imperfections only underscore that humanity.
Should you own this set? That depends entirely on what you’re after. As a primary recommendation for Handel’s Op. 6, certainly not—there are dozens of more stylistically informed versions available, including Neel’s own later release from 1950–53, which represents a considerable refinement of his approach. But as a historical document, as evidence of how far our understanding of Baroque practice has evolved, and as a reminder that musical interpretation is always a conversation between past and present… yes, absolutely.
These performances stand at a crossroads, looking backward to Romantic grandeur and forward—however uncertainly—to something leaner and more historically aware. They’re fascinating precisely because they’re unfinished business, works in progress toward an understanding that Neel himself would continue to develop. The occasional longueurs and textural heaviness can’t obscure the fundamental seriousness of purpose, the genuine love for this music that animates every bar.
Pearl deserves credit for making these pioneering efforts available again. They won’t replace your Pinnock or your English Concert, but they’ll certainly make you think differently about them.
