Janacek reckoned that he collected over 3,000 folk-songs as a young man tramping across Moravia with his friend Frantisek Bartos and scribbling down notes of the instrumentation as well as the actual tunes. It may well seem that 42 in a row is asking a lot of listeners' patience, but it works out interestingly. There being two voices helps, and the singers have the manner in their blood, so does Radoslav Kvapil, with his very sharp piano accompaniments: he not only has the bounce and kick, the lilt and sudden swerve of the rhythms at his fingertips, but can pick up the instrumental implications, for instance with The Musicians and their skirling fiddle, trilling cimbalom and thumping bass. But this might not be enough. The contrast in the sequence is good, so that there is an alternation, sometimes an accumulation, of mood between the lively, witty folk vignettes, and on the other hand more serious numbers such as the grim song of Jano, who has killed his girl and must ride off to the gallows field, and the last song, a brigand's funeral. Time and again there is the stuff of a Janacek phrase, as we know his lyrical line from the operas and still more from The diary of one who disappeared, for of course these tiny folk-songs and romances and dirges are the roots of his art.
One need not be a Janacek specialist to enjoy the record: it is graphic and refreshing. There are texts and clear translations into English and French.'