Organ Concerto Op. 4/4

It is fair to say that Handel never wrote his organ concertos with a traditional concert performance in mind, at least in the way we experience concerts today. And while he is generally given credit for inventing the organ concerto as a genre, most of their initial performances came in the early 1730s as “incidental music” during his oratorios. Handel’s organ skills are never in question: he was only outdone by J. S. Bach among his contemporaries and once, so the story goes, won a famous organ contest against Domenico Scarlatti (though Scarlatti got the better of him at the harpsichord).
Dates of composition for the concertos vary; we know better when they were first published. In this case, the F-major concerto, op. 4 no. 4, appeared in London in 1738 though its origins clearly go back much earlier. And Handel certainly never felt strong misgivings about taking material from other sources (both his own and others’ compositions) to be re-cast in his concertos and vice versa. The F-major concerto was completed in March 1735 and premiered during a performance of Athalia in April. The theme of the first movement is marked by its rhythm. He favored the melody enough to compose a choral version of it for Alcina, completed two weeks after the concerto. Only rarely does Handel opt for intricacies in voice leading or harmonic surprises, and never do such details derail the “perpetual motion’ aesthetic that characterizes so many Baroque concerto first movements. Handel’s music here bears direct comparison to Vivaldi, in particular the fairly autonomous roles played by tutti (ensemble) and solo, abundant use of harmonic sequence, limited tonal exploration, and reliance on a single theme.
Onto the basic fast-slow-fast framework of the Italian concerto form, Handel imposes elements of the four-movement church sonata, mostly in the third and fourth movements of his concerto. The third is a short recitative for solo organ into which Handel pours most of the concerto’s edgy dissonances. It is worth noting that such movements would often have been improvised, like the cadenzas in larger movements. The point is to get from “A” (slow movement) to “B” (finale) in as interesting and dramatically contrasting a manner as possible. The recitative closes with a half cadence and proceeds without pause into the fugal finale. As demonstration of how Handel liked to borrow from himself, the theme of this fugue was reused as a choral Alleluia in another oratorio not long thereafter.

(c) Jason Stell