It sounded tempting: a chance to spend First Night being wafted gently back to a London summer evening in 1717 when King George I and his court piled into boats and were rowed up the Thames from Whitehall to the accompaniment of George Frederick Handel’s Water Music, a collection of some 20 overtures, airs, and dances played by a floating orchestra. At Chelsea, they disembarked and ate a late supper (Chelsea Football Club hadn’t yet been founded, otherwise they doubtless would have gone on to Stamford Bridge to watch the favorite club of London aristocrats); then they returned, to the accompaniment of more music, around 4 a.m. Martin Pearlman and Boston Baroque tried to bring those summer breezes into Harvard’s Sanders Theatre with a First Night/New Year’s Day program that comprised the Water Music’s F-major suite, the solo cantata Agrippina condotta a morire ("Agrippina Led to Her Death"), which Handel wrote in Italy about a decade before the Water Music, and the Music for the Royal Fireworks, which was composed in 1749 to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle the year before. I can’t say I was transported, but it wasn’t a bad way to spend First Night.

The good parts included Pearlman’s mini-lectures. He informed us that the Water Music marked the first real integration of hunting horns into an orchestra. He told us what the program did not, that Agrippina was the Roman woman whose machinations made her son Nero emperor before the ungrateful wretch decided she was dangerous and had to be disposed of. And he called attention to two unusual instruments in the Royal Fireworks Music: the serpent (that’s what it looks like, a coiled low-register wind instrument), which Handel eventually deleted from the instrument list, and which few modern conductors retain; and the side drum, which gives an appropriately martial air to the proceedings. Invited to solo to show us what the serpent sounds like, Douglas Yeo brought the house down with a few bars of "Auld Lang Syne." And Pearlman tacked onto the Water Music’s F-major suite the first two pieces from the D-major suite so as to give us this music’s familiar and beloved second hornpipe.

The highlight of Pearlman’s conducting was the clarity he brought to the strings — as in the counterpoint for second violins and violas in the trio of the Water Music’s second minuet. And there was distinctive playing from the winds throughout. Still, I was seldom in Arcadia. Like many early-music conductors, Pearlman leans into Handel’s dotted rhythms, producing a jog trot that soon grows monotonous. In effect there’s only one beat to the bar, so that even at his uniformly medium-fast tempo the music sounds stodgy when exhilaration or ecstasy is what’s wanted. And though the natural horn is a devil of an instrument, his pair sound timorous next to, say, those of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Concentus Musicus Wien in their 1978 Teldec Water Music recording (their chattering trills in the third piece might be the sound of unicorns in the forest). In general the trumpets, horns, and oboes seemed overwhelmed — I counted 21 strings as opposed to the usual 15, and I wondered whether in the Royal Fireworks Music Pearlman shouldn’t have dispensed with them altogether. As for phrasing, it was conspicuous mostly by its absence. That’s not to say that celebrated early-music practitioners like Christopher Hogwood, John Eliot Gardiner, and Trevor Pinnock do much better, but Harnoncourt does on occasion (at 64 crotchets per minute as against Pearlman’s 96, he makes the F-major suite’s concluding andante sound positively romantic), as do Martin Linde and Jean-Claude Malgoire, and I have fond memories of a Yehudi Menuhin Water Music with the Bath Festival Orchestra. I don’t even want to think of what Pablo Casals or Thomas Beecham or Otto Klemperer would have to say about the state of early-music conducting today. They would have leaned against Handel’s dotted rhythms, reminding us that there’s more to music than what can be written in the score.

In this celebratory context, the cantata seemed an odd choice — haven’t we had enough dying this year? Sharon Baker was most effective in the strident sections, where she was able to belt out Agrippina’s wrath and despair without screeching; the "Infelice" aria was especially beautiful, and she got fervent support from concertmaster Daniel Stepner and cellist Karen Kaderavek. But here too the performances painted a winter monochrome where I wanted a summer riot of color.