Issued to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, this two-disc set of orchestral works may be the last Janácek recording from our greatest advocate of his work, Sir Charles Mackerras. That is what he threatens in the informative interview in the booklet-note, though I hope that at 78 he still has many years of recording activity before him, and that yet more Janácek revelations await us.

Where Mackerras’s pioneering Pro Arte recording of the Sinfonietta has an earthy quality and Decca’s Vienna version is ripe and resonant, the new one is generally lighter and more flexible. The live performance brings dividends in its winning flow and the build-up of excitement, thrillingly caught when the fanfare theme returns to cap the finale.

Mackerras emphasises these comparisons in his commentary, and he is revealing, too, on the interpretative contrasts between Brno and Prague in performing Taras Bulba, with Brno adopting far faster speeds in places. Diplomatically, he has followed both traditions, and found they both work very well. For this Prague recording he has followed what the Czech Philharmonic are used to, a mixture of the two. As in the Sinfonietta, the results are lighter and more flexible than with the Vienna Phil.

With the Pro Arte Orchestra Mackerras also recorded Jealousy, the discarded prelude to Jenufa, and the Prelude to Kát’a Kabanová. Both are a degree more urgent in the new versions, with more light and shade. He adds two tiny interludes for Kát’a which he discovered in Prague, written when the German Theatre needed more time for scene changes. Rightly, he regards them as little jewels, well worth preserving.

Where most versions of the Cunning Little Vixen Suite use Václav Talich’s reorchestration for a production at the National Theatre in Prague, Mackerras has gone back to the original. As he says, the orchestral writing may seem unusual, but it is certainly not amateurish, where Talich’s version, for all its beauty, ‘rather emasculates the acid sounds produced for the insects’. As with Talich, the suite comprises almost all of Act 1 and receives a winning performance.

The rarity is the incidental music for the play by Gerhardt Hauptmann, Schluck und Jau, music which Janácek was writing at the time of his death. As Mackerras explains, it is ‘a peculiar play whose subject matter bears a great resemblance to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot’. The first of the two completed movements brings intriguing echoes of the fanfares in the Sinfonietta and the second in 5/8 time is equally original in its instrumentation, with deep trombones and stratospheric violins. It makes one sadder than ever that Janácek’s life was cut short, just when his creative spark burnt brighter than ever.

The helpful acoustic of the Rudolfinum gives a mellow quality to the refined playing of the Czech Philharmonic, with ample space round the sound, without underplaying the contrasts of wind and strings which are so typical of the composer.