Handel's Acts and Galatea, a masque based on the pastoral story by Ovid, has been recorded by the English Baroque Soloists, under John Eliot Gardiner, with vocal soloists Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Norma Burrowes, Martyn Hill, and Willard White. This is the original version, first given in a private performance at Commons in 1718, of the work that was Handel's most popular during his lifetime. The singing is graceful and authentically embellished, and the orchestral work is light-textured and has a fine sense of spontaneity. Nicholas Kraemer provides the harpsichord continuo (Archiv 2708 038).

A recording of Acis and Galatea is rare, but rarer still is a recording of anything at all by Jan Dismas Zelenka, about whom the standard reference works offer little. A respected Dresden court composer whose contemporaries included Bach and Handel, Zelenka nourished for a time but was forgotten after he died in 1745. If his music finds a niche in the 20th century, it will be due to Heinz Holliger, who specializes in such esoterica, and DG, which has now recorded Zelenka's complete orchestral works (Archiv 2710 026). Although recorded oddities have become commonplace, Zelenka's music is special. Telemann is the composer who most readily comes to mind as a basis of comparison. Even so, Zelenka offers enough musical twists and turns to belie the notion that his talents were chiefly imitative. All this is shown to best effect by the Camerata Bern and a variety of first-rate soloists including Barry Tuckwell and, of course, Holliger.

A specialty set of a different sort (English RCA RL-25033) offers the first five of Charles-Marie Widor's ten Organ Symphonies, which were in part modeled after Franck's Grande Piéce Symphonique, regarded as the first French organ work written in sonata form. The collected movements for organ which Widor ascribed as symphonies are more correctly suites, and some have suggested that the composer used the term less in a literal sense than as a means of imputing "breadth and loftiness." The five heard here, variously played on the organ of Coventry Cathedral by Arthur Wills, Graham Steed, and Jane Parker-Smith, contain the familiar Marche Pontificate from the First Symphony, and the Toccata in F, which ends the Fifth Symphony and is Widor's most enduring contribution to the literature. Despite this familiarity, these are works for very special tastes, and RCA has not yet seen fit to offer the set in the United States. It is currently available as a German News Company import.