Composer: Thomas Augustine Arne
Works: Eight Overtures; Harpsichord Concerto No. 5; Organ Concertos Nos. 4–6; highlights from Artaxerxes, Rosamond, Comus, The Tempest, The Judgement of Paris, Bacchus and Ariadne, and Fair Caelia love pretended
Performers: Robert Tear, Joan Sutherland, Emma Kirkby, Jennifer Vyvyan, Harry Dilley, George Malcolm, Ernest Lush, Jean Guillou; Academy of Ancient Music; Academy of St Martin in the Fields; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra; Christopher Hogwood, Sir Neville Marriner, Francesco Molinari-Pradelli, René Klopfenstein
Label: DECCA – British Music Collection
Catalogue Number: 470 372-2
Timing: CD1 72:08; CD2 76:03
Thomas Augustine Arne still suffers from a kind of historical foreshortening. Mention his name and even well-informed listeners may leap straight to “Rule, Britannia!” and stop there, as though he were merely an agreeable supplier of patriotic melody and a few anthologized songs. This generous Decca set usefully restores scale. What emerges from these two discs is not a marginal figure in English music but a composer of real theatrical instinct, melodic abundance, and stylistic range, one who could move easily between overture, aria, concerto, masque, and incidental number without sounding dutiful or generic.
The Eight Overtures make the best case at once. They are shapely, alert, and full of that brisk eighteenth-century dramatic intelligence that keeps ceremonial writing from growing stiff. Arne is not trying to overwhelm by weight; he works through profile, contrast, and spring. The Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood catches exactly that quality. These readings have momentum without fuss, and the music’s courtly poise never hardens into starch. One hears a theatrical composer who knows how to set a scene before the curtain has even risen.
The Harpsichord Concerto No. 5 offers a different pleasure: elegance with a sharper edge. George Malcolm and Neville Marriner present it as a work of wit and finish rather than museum-piece correctness. Arne’s keyboard writing may not aim at the profundity of Bach or the daring of C. P. E. Bach, but it has charm, fluency, and a persuasive sense of proportion. It reminds the listener that English eighteenth-century music was never as provincial or inert as lazy textbook summaries suggest.
The Organ Concertos, played by Jean Guillou, are perhaps the most surprising items here. Guillou is not an interpreter one associates with polite antiquarianism, and that turns out to be an advantage. These performances give the concertos backbone and color. The music itself sits in an attractive borderland between Handelian public rhetoric and something lighter, more decorative, more frankly theatrical. Arne may borrow the broad ceremonial frame familiar from the organ concerto tradition, but within it he writes with his own sense of melodic turn and stage-bred timing.
The vocal and dramatic excerpts broaden the portrait still further. Robert Tear brings bright intelligence and verbal point to Bacchus and Ariadne and Fair Caelia love pretended. Joan Sutherland’s contribution from Artaxerxes reminds us that Arne’s lyric gift could sustain genuine star writing, while Emma Kirkby, in music from Rosamond, Comus, and “Where the Bee Sucks,” supplies just the right combination of purity and expressive tact. Jennifer Vyvyan’s excerpt from The Judgement of Paris adds another historical layer, making the set feel less like a single-program recital than a compact anthology of Arne performance history on record.
That anthology quality is central to the set’s value. This is not a unified new recording project built around one interpretive idea; it is a curated portrait assembled from distinguished Decca sources. The result is inevitably uneven in recorded sound and performing style, but the gains far outweigh the shifts in perspective. The compilation lets Arne appear in multiple guises: public composer, theater professional, miniaturist, melodist, and orchestrator. Heard that way, he becomes much harder to dismiss as merely a historical footnote.
If there is a reservation, it lies less with the music than with the nature of the compilation itself. A listener wanting a single ensemble and a uniform sound world may find the jumps between decades, venues, and performing traditions a little abrupt. Yet that very variety also keeps the collection alive. It avoids the deadening effect that can afflict “complete” surveys of lesser-known repertoire, where worthy consistency sometimes smothers character. Here the variety of voices becomes part of the argument.
In the end, this is exactly the sort of release that reference-series anthologies ought to be: not just a sampler, but a corrective. It demonstrates that Arne’s output was richer, more various, and more theatrically alive than his modern reputation suggests. Anyone interested in eighteenth-century British music, the revival of native repertory, or simply in hearing a gifted composer escape the prison of one famous tune should find this set both enjoyable and quietly revelatory.
