Handel arrived in Hamburg in 1703, aged eighteen. He spent four years in the city and wrote several works for the town's opera house. Hamburg opera was a rather eclectic beast at the time, drawing on Italian and French language and instrumental style alongside the native German. Handel fell happily into this genre; this CD brings together a selection of the delightful orchestral music (which tends to be in the French style) that Handel wrote there, some of it recorded for the first time.