"Mr. Handel's Celebrated Water Piece," as the relatively obscure suite for trumpet and orchestra (or alternately, and questionably, organ) in D major, HWV 341 (1733) is actually titled, is very possibly not a work whose existence Handel himself had anything to do with—although the music contained within its five movements is for the most part undeniably his own. One of the clues that the suite may be inauthentic—whatever such a word means when applied to a composer who was often so willing, or at least not unwilling, to let his publishers reorganize his music into new and sometimes rather startling forms—is the fact that John Walsh held an exclusive publishing agreement with Handel at the time the suite was first issued, and it was not he but rather the rival Wright publishing house that first printed the piece. Nevertheless, the Water Piece, as the D major suite is often called, is certainly an enjoyable enough slice of Baroque trumpet virtuosity, and whoever concocted it certainly knew well how to adapt Handel's music to exploit the tonal capabilities—boisterous and brilliant, but also gentle and warm in skilled hands—of the valveless trumpet.

The first of the Water Piece's five movements is arranged from the overture to the Second Suite of Water Music (ca. 1717), and the Gigue that follows as the second movement is from the same work. There is a delightfully laid-back Air (really a little minuet) and also an exuberant Bourrée; the March that ends the suite in D major is taken from the opera Partenope (HWV 27) that Handel composed in 1730.

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