Classical Music

See all London Handel Festival concert listings

It was here, at Number 25 Brook Street, Mayfair, that George Frideric Handel lived. In these eighteenth-century rooms he composed ‘Voodoo Chile’ and ‘Purple Haze’ before dying tragically young after ingesting several flagons of alcohol and drugs. Wait a minute; that was next door, at Number 23, where Jimi Hendrix lived.

I am sitting in the first-floor music room of the Handel House Museum and being entertained with a private recital by Laurence Cummings, museum trustee and musical director of the London Handel Festival. Well, almost private – at the sound of the spinet, a clutch of excited museum staff appears from nowhere to hear the master play. ‘Laurence is the only person allowed to even touch the spinet,’ says one lady breathlessly.

He is a good sport, and ‘Lovely Laurence’ (as I am reliably informed he is known in the business) reels off a peal of arpeggios by Purcell before moving to sit at the harpsichord. It is getting late now and after the staff have left for home I’m treated to a truly private audience. As the sun sets and the shadows lenghten he plays Handel’s Sarabande in G minor. Meanwhile, the faces in the portraits that hang in the modest Georgian room look on impassively. When the last chords have dissipated, he regails me with how, some years ago while accompanying soprano Lesley Garrett at this very keyboard, he felt a ghostly presence enter the room from the door behind.

Could it have been the great man en route from his deathbed on the floor above? Cummings doesn’t think so, and if anyone is qualified to recognise Handel, he is – as head of historical performance at the Royal Academy of Music, Cummings’s life seems to revolve around this particular big wig. This evening, he arrived breathless from a day rehearsing the opera ‘Atalanta’ and is poised to shoot off home to rehearse ‘Joshua’, the oratorio that will open the thirty-first London Handel Festival on Thursday at St George’s (the church around the corner in Hanover Square in which Handel used to worship).

Cummings is fascinated by the German-born composer and has been involved with the festival since he was a student in 1990. ‘The more I embrace his work,’ he declares, ‘the more there is to discover.’ Adding, ‘his music has a beauty, simplicity and emotional maturity which is staggering.’

Handel was also a canny businessman and made a fortune through his opera company and commissions. Never one to miss a trick, he even charged the public admission to attend the rehearsals, in this first-floor room, of his operas and oratorios – singers and audience packed tight and, somewhere in the middle, Handel directing from the keyboard. And it was through one of these very windows that he threatened to defenestrate the famous Italian diva Francesca Cuzzoni.

Cummings, too, has made a career through his academic and performing expertise with the composer. ‘I’m very lucky with Handel,’ he exclaims. ‘I get plenty of work because his music is so substantial.’ Cummings pauses, before confessing, ‘I owe him a lot.’ Then he winks, ‘and not just financially.’

The London Handel Festival runs from Mar 13-Apr 24. For further details visit www.london-handel-festival.com
Handel House Museum, 25 Brook St, W1 (020 7495 1685/ www.handelhouse.org).