A lot has changed in the decade since this Artaxerxes was originally released. Ian Page’s Classical Opera Company has become The Mozartists, rising stars have well and truly risen, and Thomas Arne’s opera – after the triumphant 2009 run at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre that led up to this recording – has once again faded into memory. High time, then, that a reissue reminded us all what we’re missing.

After an 1808 fire destroyed the score, Arne’s opera survived only as arias and ensembles, missing both its recitatives and finale. It was a barrier to performance that proved insurmountable until 1995, when Roy Goodman made the first recording from an edition by Peter Holman.

Page’s 2010 account (originally on Linn, now reissued on Signum) is still only the second, and offers a different set of solutions. The recitatives (efficient, unstartling) are supplied by Page himself, while scholar Duncan Druce provides a newly composed finale. It’s musical scaffolding for an immensely attractive piece – Handelian opera seria expressed with Mozartian lightness and brevity, and just the faintest traces of English balladry.

A glance through the personnel gives a good sense of the disc’s quality – Joseph Crouch, Matthew Truscott, Bojan Čičić, Steven Devine – and the cast-list is no less starry, from soprano Elizabeth Watts (stepping into Janet Baker and Catherine Bott’s shoes as the vacillating princess Mandane) and Australian mezzo Caitlin Hulcup as hero Arbaces, to countertenor Christopher Ainslie as ruler-in-waiting Artaxerxes.

You feel the energy of the theatrical run in the recording. Musical dialogue is crisp and pacy, and embellished arias gleam with much polishing. Watts is the standout. Her ‘Fly, soft ideas, fly’ becomes a proto-‘Abscheulicher’ as she casts femininity aside and girds herself in horns and oboes, ready to turn avenger. The coloratura here and in the famous ‘The soldier tir’d of war’s alarms’ is right in the groove, though her agility is, if anything, outdone by the drama of her leaps and the brilliance of her top notes.

Hulcup’s Arbaces makes short work of the showpiece ‘Amid a thousand racking woes’, giving us the best of both worlds: a countertenor’s lightness and a mezzo’s broader colours. She has the unenviable task of playing the straight man to Daniel Norman’s Rimenes – a villain whose easy charm and folk-glancing arias (delivered with G&S ease) are hard to resist.

All the cast are strong, though Andrew Staples’s Artabanes does little to resolve the weakness of Arne’s characterisation, but it’s the band who really propel this recording. Dance rhythms spring and glide, phrasing given space but never indulged, and woodwind, brass and timpani shade a rather pallid libretto with all the textural interest you could want. Still very much recommended.