AAM Concerts old

Music of pure celebration as Laurence Cummings and Academy of Ancient Music ignite their 50th anniversary season with Handel’s Fireworks Music and Water Music.

A royal court, a floating orchestra and a pyrotechnic display so dazzling that it brought London to a standstill. In early Georgian England, George Frideric Handel was the grand master of sonic pageantry, and his Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks are the sound of pure celebration: as fresh, as stirring and as gloriously tuneful now as they were three centuries ago.

But if you want to hear how Handel would actually have sounded back then: well, let’s just say that no period-instrument orchestra has more of a history with these scores than the Academy of Ancient Music. Five decades ago, the AAM redefined the way we listen to Handel. Tonight, under the AAM’s ‘exhilarating’ (Evening Standard) music director Laurence Cummings, they’ll light up the sky all over again.

A free pre-concert talk will take place at 6.30pm at the Fountain Room on Level G.

Tickets for this concert are available to purchase as part of a multi-buy: see the Barbican website for more details.

Photo: David Johnson