The English Concert – Harry Bicket, Director

When the Father of our country was born in 1732, Henry Purcell, alas, was long dead—but Georg Philipp Telemann was writing music in Hamburg, and George Frideric Handel was composing in London. The music of these three composers will be performed here by one of the world’s finest chamber orchestras, the English Concert. The ensemble is acclaimed for its Handel interpretations, and its appearance on our series anchors the biennial American Handel Festival in Princeton in 2013. In the 1970s, this chamber orchestra, according to London’s Daily Telegraph, blazed the trail of “historically informed” performances of Handel and his baroque brethren. “Audiences were amazed to hear this music played on instruments appropriate to the period, and with a dancing kind of expressivity rather than a heavy, romantic one,” said the newspaper, a revolutionary approach that George Washington surely would have related to.