It’s been a good year for Janáček’s The Diary of One who Disappeared. First came Nicky Spence’s superb new account on Hyperion, and then the return of Vilém Přibyl’s recording to the catalogue. Now comes a fine new recording from the Slovak tenor Pavol Breslik, distinguished by his pleasing, plangent tone and sensitive musicianship.

An established Tamino, Breslik has a soft-grained, lyric voice that’s less heroic than Spence and Přibyl, but he’s unfazed by the cycle’s extremes and charts a sensible interpretative course with his fine pianist, Robert Pechanec. There’s plenty of urgency early on, a touching hint of romantic desperation as well as an expected ease with the language: here’s a less brawny Janík than Spence’s, one for whom daydreaming feels more natural than toiling on the land. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I miss the Scottish tenor’s dramatic range and vividness.

Similarly, Ester Pavlu is a fine mezzo soloist, her voice with a distinctive rich tang to it, but presents a relatively straightforward account of the boy’s love interest. Pechanec’s playing is alive and suitably angular but he doesn’t quite achieve the same forcefulness and intensity as Julius Drake in the Intermezzo erotico on the Hyperion release, and is not helped by slightly unnatural piano sound. The mystical trio of voices is captured with rather too much reverberation.

An enjoyable account of this great work, then, but not quite on the same inspired level as Spence and Drake’s account. And while Breslik offers some rarities as a coupling, neither collection is really top drawer Janáček. It’s distinctly unhelpful – with the lesser-known pieces, in particular –that on an album emblazoned with the English title of the cycle, Orfeo have provided translations in German only