The greatest interest in this record is the substitution, in the String Quartet No. 2, of a viola d’amore for the conventional viola. In fact, the viola we know was the substitution. Enchanted by his late love, Kamila Stosslova, Janacek included in the original version (as he did in other of his late works) an instrument whose gentle sound and softly reverberating ‘sympathetic’ strings caught his imagination. However, it seems ‘that the name of the instrument was more important to Janacek than the technical possibilities’ (John Tyrrell, in a study of the whole question in his Cambridge Opera Handbook on Kata Kabanova; Cambridge: 1982). In rehearsal, Janacek came to his senses and reluctantly cut it out. It is indeed, as the player persuaded him, impracticable. Even with the advantages of recording, one need only listen to such a passage as that from 2'20'' on track 9 to hear it trying, and failing, to make sense of the shared line with the cello against the high trilling and arpeggiating violins. However, there is more to the present version than this. A good deal of the scoring is different, as when the boldly bowed chords of the familiar opening are played pizzicato, and so is a good deal of the thematic material and its handling. It seems that much took place between Janacek’s first draft, the early rehearsals and performances, and the revision for publication ten years after his death. But as far as a complicated story can be judged, the standard score, used in the many recordings of the piece, is as near as we are likely to get to what Janacek approved in his last months.
That does not detract from the fascination of this version and performance, which is certainly one for the shelves of Janacek collectors. The other pieces are either early or of small importance, or both. The two Ave Maria settings are gentle and fluent. The speech melodies are newly organized montages that have no place here. The half-dozen bars in memory of the Mrstik brothers are a tiny gesture of homage. The poor teachers get 27 possibly inauthentic bars – not much of a gold watch after all they’ve put up with.'