Getting a handle on Handel

300 years ago, London’s booming cultural world was being bossed by an upstart German immigrant musician who had arrived from nowhere a few years earlier and instantly got himself in with the Royals and the artistic establishment. With this year’s London Handel Festival in full swing, Robert Thicknesse and Yehuda Shapiro ask their guests Katharine Hogg — librarian of the Gerald Coke Collection at the Foundling Museum — and The English Concert’s director Harry Bicket how our hero George Frideric Handel managed that … and to redraw the whole British musical landscape in his own likeness.