On June 29, 1888, Handel’s Israel in Egypt was recorded onto wax cylinders at London’s Crystal Palace, the first known classical music recording.

Sir August Manns conducted an orchestra composed of 500 musicians and 4,000 voices.  Over 23,000 people were in the audience for the afternoon concert. American Colonel George Gouraud took his Edison recording machine into the stands to record the performance. Three of his cylinders, thought lost, were found in the 1950s and preserved by the BBC. 

G.F. Handel
Part of the Handel and Bach set issued
in 1988 by Turks and Caicos Islands
Designer: Susan David 
I opted for this stamp because the UK hasn’t issued a nice looking
Handel stamp

Between 1888 and 1899 Gouraud was briefly the toast of London, and used his ownership of the phonograph to penetrate society to its highest levels. He was a naturally hearty and likeable man and it no doubt helped him that–as an American–there was no class barrier to prevent his free movement through the higher echelons of the wealthy and the aristocracy. His team of “recordists” may have made the cylinders, but it was Gouraud himself who brought Gladstone and others to the
machine. (Gladstone was a political hero on both sides of the Atlantic and it had been Edison’s dearest ambition from the start to have cylinders of the old–age: 79–man sent to New Jersey).

… Just three days after the machine’s arrival, the two men took the phonograph to the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace close to Gouraud’s home and recorded a 4000-voice choir accompanied by a 500-piece orchestra in a performance of “Israel in Egypt.” The three surviving eerie recordings were thought lost until the 1980’s when they miraculously re-surfaced in the archives of the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). It was an incredibly bold idea to attempt such a recording on an invention scarcely a month old. 
1888 London cylinder recordings of Col. George Gouraud