On track: Comedy of confusion

English conductor Richard Hickox is geographically not so far away these days, with his transtasman tenure as Australian Opera's music director. He checked in early this year with Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges starring our own Wendy Dawn Thompson.

Few conductors are as prolific or wide-ranging as Hickox and on his latest CD he wields a baton for two, frothy one-act operettas by Arthur Sullivan.

With the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and five sterling soloists, premier quality goes without saying.

The 1866 Cox and Box was written before Sullivan teamed up with W.S. Gilbert and is a curtain-raiser for three singers - the score describes it as a "triumviretta". It is a farcical comedy of confusion in which two lodgers, inadvertently sharing the same room, discover they are long-lost brothers.

Francis Burnand's libretto is pared down to a few connecting sentences, the most treasurable being "Who else but a tenor would sing a lullaby to a piece of bacon at half-past eight in the morning?" The emphasis is on Sullivan's sparkling score.

The musical satire is adept and delightful, from the Mendelssohnian overture to Bouncer's Handelian Rataplan, rollickingly rendered by Donald Maxwell.

Sullivan's original orchestration is particularly piquant, especially in the drawing-room duet of The Buttercup, with pizzicato strings catching the "gay guitar". The Gilbert and Sullivan partnership started in 1875 with Trial by Jury, a half-hour "Dramatic Cantata", a courtroom carry-on spun around a Breach of Promise.

There is real dash and wit here with the absence of Gilbert's sometimes laboured dialogue. One can relax with Sir Arthur, as he runs from ingenious recitative to chattering chorus, and the music nods elegantly at composers from Bach (or at least Handel) to Offenbach.

Maxwell is the judge here, jogging amiably through his pattered When I, good friends and Rebecca Evans, a soprano acclaimed for her Mozart performances, makes the most of her I love him I love him.

If you are a G&S fan, you won't be able to live without this disc; if you are not, this CD just might convert you.

* Sullivan, Cox & Box/Trial by Jury (Chandos CHAN 10321, through Ode Records)