It is a pleasure to be able to welcome the first of Decca's Janacek opera cycle under Sir Charles Mackerras on to CD in a recording that always was outstanding and that now gains from the extra clarity of the format: may it soon be followed by the others. Elisabeth Soderstrom's superb performance in the title-role is surrounded by an excellent and well-balanced cast: it includes Eva Randova's Kostelnicka, a role made the more rounded and sympathetic here by the inclusion of the so-called 'explanation' aria in Act 1, as well as Petr Dvorskys's lively charmer of a Steva and Wieslaw Ochman's dignified Laca, not to mention Lucia Popp's scatterbrain of a Karolka. The recording, it may be remembered, finds room for the original, now generally discarded, overture usually known as Zarlivost ( ''Jealousy''), also for the familiar ending in the orchestration by Karel Kovarovic as an appendix: among this recording's scholarly restorations is Janacek's original ending.
These matters are the work of Dr John Tyrell, whose masterly introduction is preserved in the new booklet, though the photographic reduction of the original generously proportioned booklet for CD format has meant that it is much less clear-edged as well as being much smaller. Worse, the original photographs are now in some cases scarcely worth the trouble: the members of the Prague National Theatre Orchestra have now become totally unrecognizable. The figure on the left, said to be Janacek, might equally well be Toscanini. This would be less irksome were the actual material in the booklet not so distinguished.'