Arne: Artaxerxes

Following the highly acclaimed production at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, The Classical Opera Company presents Artaxerxes, recorded to celebrate the 300th anniversary of composer Thomas Arne.

This is the first complete recording of one of the most important and successful of all English operas, with the lost Finale realised most effectively by Duncan Druce.

Composer Thomas Arne, most famous for composing ‘Rule Britannia’, also won fans in Mozart and Haydn with his opera Artaxerxes that remained in the London repertoire almost continuously from its premiere in 1762 until the 1830s.

This stunning, but rarely recorded, opera has many well-known arias including ‘The soldier tir'd’, originally made famous by Joan Sutherland and sung here by Elizabeth Watts (“A lyric soprano as ravishing as one could possibly want” IRR).

The Classical Opera Company was founded in 1997 by conductor Ian Page. It specialises in the music of Mozart and his contemporaries, performing with its own period-instrument orchestra, and is emerging as one of Britain's most exciting and highly regarded young arts organisations.

The company appears regularly in London at such venues as Sadler's Wells, the Barbican and Wigmore Hall and has also performed at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, The Anvil, Basingstoke, St George's, Bristol, the Barbican's Mostly Mozart Festival, the Lufthansa Baroque Festival, the Bath International Music Festival, the Brighton Festival and the Buxton Festival.

2CD's for the price of 1

Thomas Arne was one of the great survivors of eighteenth-century theatrical life: in his early twenties he put on an unauthorized production of Acis and Galatea that prodded Handel into taking English seriously as a language for theatrical works. It should therefore come as no surprise that in the three years from 1759 he had three smash hits of his own, each an original masterpiece that effectively created a new genre. Artaxerxes, the second of these, was the first attempt to set a full-blown opera seria libretto in English.

The story of the rebellious captain of the guard’s attempts to usurp the Persian throne in the fifth century BC had captured the attention of several composers, but Arne’s opera was particularly successful because it was an excellent vehicle for great singing. Mandane’s spectacular aria ‘The Soldier, tir’d of War’s Alarms’ remained a show-piece for sopranos through much of the nineteenth century and has never entirely dropped out of the repertory.

When Haydn saw Artaxerxes in 1791 he was delighted with it and reportedly said he ‘had no idea we had such an opera in the English language’.