Poulenc the miniaturist par excellence burst into public view, fully-formed in his late teens, emerging flamboyantly into the artistic swirl of 1920s Paris. His fabulously inventive, quirky and colourful approach to writing for chamber ensemble and voice comes vividly to life in this set of early works which capture all of his youthful elegance, wit, and occasionally sardonic humour.

A rapacious dragon has been terrorising a Yorkshire village. Gubbins and his daughter Margery, together with Mauxalinda, decide to seek the help of Moore of Moore Hall. Moore needs persuading away from his beer but succumbs to Margery’s pleading, and her promises of love. Unfortunately, he had already promised to marry Mauxalinda, and so the love triangle has to be resolved in dramatic fashion before Moore heads out and defeats the dragon, restoring harmony and prosperity to the village. Following the BBC Music Magazine Opera Award for his recording of Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master, conductor John Andrews returns with the world premiere professional recording of John Frederick Lampe’s operatic comedy The Dragon of Wantley. With librettist Henry Carey, Lampe combines a first-rate score with a quintessentially English plot, told in a tone of earthy satire, pastiching opera’s conventions with skill and affection, but also a razor wit.

This album brings together orchestral music by two English composers who are also good friends – and both born in East Anglia: Nicholas Barton in Norfolk in 1950 and Christopher Wright in Suffolk in 1954. Moreover, they share a similar musical language: largely tonal, if loosely so, rhythmically alert, transparently but dramatically scored and with a natural feeling for symphonic argument and growth, and a powerful sense of scale.

Originally intended as an opera for television, Malcolm Arnold’s collaboration with film-maker and librettist Joe Mendoza, The Dancing Master, Op. 34, was considered too racy for viewers in the 1950s and subsequently rejected for broadcast and largely forgotten. Conductor John Andrews, with the BBC Concert Orchestra and a stellar cast, breathes new life into this operatic gem, here receiving its first recording. With its cast of larger-than life Restoration caricatures – the trapped heiress, the scheming maid, the over-protective guardian, and the handsome rake – the opera showcases Arnold’s taste for exuberant satire and tender Romanticism in equal measure.

Thomas Arne’s opera The Judgment of Paris (1742), a setting of William Congreve’s libretto of the same name, is known only from the printed score, but in this world premiere recording is performed with panache and authority by The Brook Street Band and a scintillating young cast led by sopranos Mary Bevan (Venus), Susanna Fairbairn (Pallas) and Gillian Ramm (Juno), with tenors Ed Lyon as the shepherd Paris and Anthony Gregory as Mercury, all under the expert direction of conductor John Andrews.