"Händel With Care", …that baroque music - as Harnoncourt says - can be understood as a "speech of sound"…
(Darmstädter Echo)
To found an ensemble of our own certainly was an idea we all shared. We aimed at reanimating those old scores with baroque music each of us had at home. And so we started a journey back to our musical roots. That was in 1999.
Thus out of the idea to play baroque music on modern instruments in a small group Händel With Care was born, now set with violin, oboe, violoncello, theorbe and harpsichord. Our concern is to experience the vitality and to understand the artistic variety of baroque expressiveness. It is the charm and wit, the dramatic gesture and ardour, in short the so called Affektrhetorik, that grips us anew over and over again. We try to get close to the composers and their era, we adapt authentic techniques on our modern instruments as far as possible. Ornamentation and improvisation, a convention quite normal to baroque musicians, has become the most exciting part of our work. We examine treatises of those composers that deal with their characteristic personal style and at the same time we permanently develop our manner of playing. With every concert the joy and fun increases to play more freely and plunge into the free treatment of the continuo part. Sometimes, when curiously following the traces of old masters we come out with some new arrangements of our own. We don’t wish to be looked upon as a "revival band", but try to throw a bridge across and newly recreate wonderful masterpieces of this magnificent epoch, thereby using historic traditions to convert old manuscripts into modern speech of sound. There is the wish that leads us, that the listeners’ hearts open up on woeful lament or get a kick when Buxtehude asks to play for a dance.
…as the name of the ensemble says, played with care and precision.
…so colourful can baroque music be.
(Darmstädter Echo)