River Thames
The Water Music composed by George Frideric Handel premiered on 17 July 1717, when King George I requested a concert on the River Thames. The concert was performed for King George I on his barge and he is said to have enjoyed it so much that he ordered the 50 exhausted musicians to play the suites three times on the trip.
Concerti grossi, Op. 6 (Handel)
Handel's twelve grand concertos were already available to the public through Walsh's 1740 solo organ arrangements of four of them and through the various editions of the full Opus 6 produced during Handel's lifetime. Twenty-five years after Handel's death, a Handel Commemoration was initiated in London by George III in 1784, with five concerts in Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon. These concerts, repeated over the next few years and establishing an English tradition for Handel festivals in the nineteenth century and beyond, were on a grand scale, with huge choruses and instrumental forces, far beyond what Handel had at his disposal: apart from sackbuts and trombones, a special organ was installed in the Abbey with displaced keyboards. Nevertheless, excerpts from four of his grand concertos (Nos. 1, 5, 6 and 11), originally conceived for baroque chamber orchestra, were performed at the first commemoration; Op. 6, No. 1, was played in its entirety at the fourth concert in Westminster Abbey. They were described in detail by the contemporary musicologist and commentator Charles Burney in 1785. Three years later Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart incorporated the Musette from Op. 6, No. 6, and a short Largo from Op. 6, No. 7, into his reorchestration of "Acis and Galatea", K 566.