Samuel Arnold was a leading figure on the London musical scene in the late-18th century. One of the capital’s premier theatre composers, he also owned and ran for a while the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens and in later life became organist at the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey. He was also respected in academic circles, and published 180 instalments of an intended complete Handel edition.

His Op 8 Overtures are in fact three-movement symphonies composed for Marylebone, and in truth pretty light fare, their standardised galant clichés presenting the amiable countenance of a JC Bach or an early Mozart without capturing their more refined features or finding their kind of momentum. Of more interest is the stage music. Like many a theatre man, he is not afraid to make the odd pragmatic borrowing, and in his incidental music to Macbeth he bypasses the play’s supernatural element and emphasises its Scottishness by importing several authentic folk tunes, each given a pleasingly sensitive orchestral arrangement. His own original music includes a rattling military march and an ever-so-slightly Scottish-sounding Minuet for the Banquet scene. In the overture to Polly, sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, Arnold again shows his theatrical nous by conjuring up the past in a medley of some of the earlier work’s well known tunes. Under Kevin Mallon the modern instruments of Toronto Camerata play with style, accuracy and commitment.