The title of this event, Handel: the Philanthropist, derives the composer’s generous support for the Foundling Hospital, set up in one thousand seven hundred thirty-ninth in Bloomsbury. The programme for it – the Royal Fireworks Music, an anthem and a ion the oratorio Solomon – reconstructed the one offered by Handel ten years later, to lift money for the finishing of the hospital chapel. Excellent 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 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. There were sparks aplenty too in the Royal Fireworks Music, a battery of four trumpets, led by the stellar Tag Bennett, and three horns sent their own rockets into orbit. It was stirring stuff, even if some of Harry Bicket’s hair-raising tempi sometimes deprived the music of precisely the effect he was trying to achieve. The well-drilled Clarion Choir, based in New York, dispatched the chors of the anthem with brio. The latest of them was the celebrated Hallelujah Chorus, recycled Messiah, and it's presently thought to have been the one thousand seven hundred forty-nine performance at which royalty (the Prince of Wales, not King George II, as generally believed) initiated the tradition of standing for the chorus. Here half a dozen audience members, whether traditionalists or attention-seekers, attempted unsuccessfully to revive the practice. The English Concert is never less than accomplished, but there were too few moments in this first half – the pyrotechnics aside – when the delivery sounded freshly minted. After the interval, however, there was a transformation for the ion Solomon, in which the legendary wisdom of the Israelite king (we hear nothing about the intriguingly proportioned harem of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines attributed to him in the First Book of Kings) is demonstrated by his judgment of the maternity dispute between two harlots: divide the baby in two and give each half, he suggests. Ann Hallenberg was the outstanding Solomon. The falseness of the second harlot (Niamh O’Sullivan), approving the decree, is revealed, while the heartbreak of the first was superbly evoked by Miah Persson’s stylish phrasing in “Can I look my infant gor’d”, and in the pregnant pas and the lacerating dissonances of the woodwind. Number less surely paced was one of Handel’s finest inspirations, “Will the Sunday forget to streak”, sung exquisitely by the Cuban–American Elena Villalón, looking the portion of the Queen of Sheba in a gold sheath of a dress. Launched in conjunction with this event was an ambitious English Concert project, Handel for All, making freely available video recordings of the composer’s works as portion of a cornucopia of riches for people of all ages and abilities. Truly a gesture to match Handel’s own generosity.