The London Handel Players is a world class ensemble bringing together leading period-instrument specialists in the field of baroque chamber music.
Closely associated with the music of George Frideric Handel, we also explore the work of his contemporaries to present a vast repertoire of gems from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Our ensemble is flexible in size, consisting primarily of strings, flute/recorder and harpsichord, but capable of expanding to perform larger-scale orchestral works and concertos.
We perform regularly at Handel’s church, St George’s Hanover Square and at the Handel House Museum and Wigmore Hall, in addition to appearing at music societies and festivals worldwide.
Latest news
Total Eclipse, Handel at Home vol. 2
'Total Eclipse', our latest recording, was released on 20th October 2023 on Somm Recordings. We have had a number of wonderful reviews:
"An incandescent presence, Brown deploys her invention, and the particular qualities of the traverse flute - its sensitivity to touch and breath, its audible woodiness, its luminous colours - to create a music wholly her own…
Equally fascinating is Butterfield's one-to-a-part version of Handel's Sonata a 5; the shading and textures he brings to his line, and the Corellian lashings which he and the others apply to their parts, are their invention.
Silas Wollston bends Handel's harpsichord version of 'Ombra cara' into a revelatory excursus: under Wollston's fingers, the aria becomes an intricately voiced, delicately times, soul-baring almost-sonata, as if this were the music Handel first imagined before being forced to submit to the exigencies of opera seria.”
Berta Joncus, BBC Music Magazine, December 2023
"It’s one thing to say that you’re recording a programme of music fit for an 18th-century evening’s domestic music-making. It’s another for the finished result to actually sound like one. Yet this beautifully polished second volume of ‘Handel at Home’ from the London Handel Players has achieved exactly that, thanks to a tranquilly close-knit chamber dynamic that has then sounding like eight peas in a pod, and to the acoustic of st. John the Baptist Church in Loughton having been captured as a subtle warmth rather than as a churchilly sonorous presence.
The utter closeness of the duetting between [flautist] Brown and violinist Adrian Butterfield in Giulio Cesare’s ‘Se pietà’; the brightly fluid, rich-toned rhythmic buoyancy in the outer movements of the Corelli-breathed Sonata a 5, the closest Handel got to a violin concerto; and the emotively vocal quality that [Silas] Wollston’s slight whisper of rubato has reinfected into the circling lines of Handel’s own harpsichord arrangement of ‘Ombra cara’. All in all, an end-to-end pleasure."
Charlotte Gardner, Gramophone Magazine, January 2024
Recent concert reviews
"On a bill that began with three Advent or Christmas cantatas and finished with a Magnificat that sounded, well, magnificent, characterful solo parts for singers and instrumentalists combined with blazing ensemble climaxes that gave the impression of a stage populated by far more than five voices and 15 players. The outfit led by violinist-director Adrian Butterfield featured plenty of Handel specialists, but this never felt like a coterie gathering. Butterfield’s forces wrapped us all in a powerful celebratory hug....In the following “Gloria in excelsis deo”, which Bach would later evolve into a section of the B minor Mass, the trumpet trio glinted and soared for the first time as this small-but-mighty choir blended punch and precision into a cathedral-strength sound. More splendid flute-playing, from Rachel Brown and Katy Bircher, added to the jubilation while Adrian Butterfield ensured that the whole caravan moved along with a magisterial tread, purposive but never frantic."
Boyd Tonkin, The Arts Desk, 19th December 2023
"At Wigmore Hall, director-violinist Adrian Butterfield led his London Handel Players in works for Advent and Christmas written by JS Bach, from 1715 to the 1740s. Five terrific singers – sopranos Hilary Cronin and Jessica Cale, countertenor Hugh Cutting, tenor Charles Daniels and bass Jerome Knox – moved seamlessly between solos, duets and ambitious choruses. From the sorrowful Süsser Trost, mein Jesus kommt, BWV 151, a lullaby-like plea for comfort with flute obbligato (Rachel Brown), to the exultant Gloria in excelsis Deo, BWV 191, this first half of the programme was rich in itself.
Then came the Magnificat in D, BWV 243, complete with the four interpolations for Christmas Day (Butterfield combined elements of the two versions Bach wrote; the work has a complicated backstory). Impossible to imagine what the congregation in Leipzig must have felt on first hearing this masterly song of praise. Explosive from the start, rampant in its word painting, bristling with cryptograms, codes and harmonic symmetry, racing from low to high, high to low, the entire work is a summation of joy. It does draw breath, as in the tender alto-tenor duet, beautifully sung by the youthful, expansive Cutting and the experienced, rock-like Daniels. Violins, violas and flutes spun a softly undulating web around them. All ends with a triumph of trumpets and drums, singers and players projecting for dear life, with a jubilation that spread to the cheering audience."
London Handel Players ★★★★★
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 23rd December 2023
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