London's love affair with Handel is so strong that the Barbican's 'Mostly Mozart' festival opened with a piece not by Amadeus but by George Frederic.
The piece was Handel's Alexander's Feast, an oratorio with a text by the great 18th-century dramatist John Dryden that tells of an evening at the court of Alexander the Great - in a version re-orchestrated by Mozart.
The Feast had its premiere in 1736 and Mozart's version 54 years later, was an attempt to make Handel's music better known. In Mozart's Vienna the only music played was contemporary music, rather like today's popular music scene where radio stations might play only current hits.
While this was exciting for living composers, it meant that good, older works were being buried. Mozart loved Handel's music.
He was not alone, Beethoven said, 'Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived. I would bare my head and kneel at his grave.' To make Handel's music palatable to the Vienna of his time Mozart changed the orchestration of Alexander's Feast to fit it for a full classical orchestra with a much-enlarged woodwind section.
Handelian purists are still outraged by what they see as Mozart's unnecessary tinkering. Yet others see this as a form of tribute, rather like issuing a cover version of a golden oldie.
