This premiere recording from conductor John Andrews, a vivacious cast and BBC Concert Orchestra is dollops of fun, and more besides. Arnold’s inventive, eclectic score is vividly brought to life...this is no dismissible pastiche, but a seriously worthwhile addition to the repertoire.

This performance by BBC forces is ideal. The mostly young cast members sing ardently and with clear enunciation; tenor Ed Lyons as Gerard (the hero) and soprano Eleanor Dennis as Miranda (his sweetheart) add an attractively Mozartean touch. Andrews’s conducting is lively and the sound quality is first-rate.

Here’s a tonic for a melancholy year: a one-act comic opera by Malcolm Arnold, unstaged in the composer’s lifetime and never commercially recorded. Andrews and his collaborators make generous amends in this new recording of what turns out to be an absolute zinger of a score...It all has that bracing, sophisticated freshness so typical of Arnold’s music in the 1950s, and Andrews and the BBC Concert Orchestra sound like they’re loving every bar: letting it be its own vivid, lively self.

It’s hard to imagine anyone putting a better case for the piece than John Andrews and his soloists, led by Eleanor Dennis and Ed Lyon as a mellifluous pair of melancholy lovers.