The Fake Amsterdam

Bonus track twenty-one was a piece for oboe that ended up on a violin. Bonus track twenty-two did the same, long before.

The facts. Bonus track twenty-two runs three minutes and three seconds. It is the first movement, Larghetto, of George Frideric Handel’s Sonata in A minor, HWV 362, printed as his Op. 1 No. 4. The credit is the same as on bonus track twenty-one.

Handel wrote it for treble recorder and harpsichord. His manuscript says flauto e cembalo, and in Handel’s day flauto meant the recorder.

The Larghetto is fifty bars long, in A minor, three beats to the bar.

Around 1730 a set of Handel’s solo sonatas appeared with an Amsterdam title page, in the name of the publisher Jeanne Roger.

“Jeanne Roger, Amsterdam.”

Jeanne Roger had died in 1722.

The printer was John Walsh, in London, Handel’s own city. Soon afterwards he reissued the sonatas under his own name.

The title pages offered them for German flute, oboe or violin. Four were really for recorder, and this was one of them.

Handel’s own manuscripts of the recorder sonatas only came to light in the late 1970s.

This album has met forgers before. Track six and track nineteen were Kreisler’s own music under other people’s names.

Bonus track twenty-two is the other way round: Handel’s music, under someone else’s address.

On Garrett’s repertoire list there is one Handel entry, and it is this one, on Immortal.

And he plays it on the violin, one of the instruments Walsh’s title page offered it to, nearly three hundred years ago.

This series keeps asking what carries music past the people who made it.

Bonus track twenty-two’s answer is a printer with a false address. He put it in players’ hands labelled for the wrong instruments, and they kept playing it.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — from 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep walking through it.

Sources & notes: the album credit as listed for the deluxe edition by Universal Music; the instrument, the autograph’s wording and the movement from the reference literature on HWV 362 (after Lasocki and Bergmann) and the notes to BIS-CD-955; the Roger imprint, Walsh and the title pages from the reference literature on Handel’s solo sonatas (after Terence Best) and the preface to the Henle edition of the flute sonatas; Garrett’s recordings from david-garrett.com.