The title of this event, Handel: the Philanthropist, derives from the composer’s generous support for the Foundling Hospital, set up in 1739 in Bloomsbury. The programme for it – the Royal Fireworks Music, an anthem and a selection from the oratorio Solomon – reconstructed the one offered by Handel 10 years later, to raise money for the finishing of the hospital chapel.
Good works were expected, of course, of the wealthy in Georgian England and the Foundling Hospital Anthem celebrates the magnanimity of donors as much as it empathises with the “poor and fatherless”. It may not be top-drawer Handel – parts of it are recycled from earlier music of the composer, as was his wont – but it was set alight here in the very first aria by the tenor James Way, whose delivery, combining animation and nuance, is that of a true Handelian.
