Malcolm Arnold died just four weeks before his home town's two-day festival of his works to mark what would have been his 85th birthday, culminating in a concert by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Barry Wordsworth.

There was even a new piece to unveil - Burlesque, a single movement for horn and orchestra written in 1944, whose nearly complete manuscript was discovered a few years back, by Alan Poulton, in a pile of sketches at the composer's home, and edited for this belated premiere by Philip Lane.

Composed around the time Arnold was beginning to make a name for himself, it is apparently the first movement of a projected concerto, and shares some material with his official Horn Concerto No 1, written a year later. The result is an attractive addition to the composer's catalogue in the shape of a short and characteristically lightweight piece, carried off with panache on this occasion by Martin Owen.

Elsewhere, Wordsworth obtained decent performances from the RPO, though he could have done more to keep the brass in check in what is an unforgiving acoustic. The programme took in familiar works ranging in period from the rhapsody Arnold drew from his score to the 1952 film The Sound Barrier to the Eighth Symphony of 1978. The chirpy Irish marching tune that crops up in the first movement of the latter is typical, as is the fact that Arnold repeats it at least twice too often.

Indeed, the buttonholing nature of Arnold's jokiness can prove irritating in such pieces as the Grand, Grand Overture and The Fair Field, but the sheer know-how of his orchestration always remains ultra-professional.