Making arrangements

Recently I found myself lured for the second time in as many years to what is surely one of the most alluring music festivals in the world, the Handel Festival in Göttingen, Germany, which has survived — nay, flourished — for more than 80 years now, come hell, high water and Hitler. It’s alluring in the first place because of Handel, of course. No music makes one feel more glad to exist than Handel’s, and that, let me assure you from personal experience, comes in handy at difficult times. But it’s also alluring because one really does feel that one is present at a festival, an occasion for celebratory feasting, musically and otherwise. The ancient university town, which claims to have been associated with more Nobel prize winners than any other, is small enough for the collision of musicians and audiences to be an inevitability, and with someone as effervescent and gregarious as Nicholas McGegan serving as its artistic director, as he’s done with outstanding success since the early 1990s, a good time is guaranteed for one and all.