With his Pan-Slav ideal for Czech lands to be integrated into an entity presided over by the Russians, Janáček would surely have taken pleasure in this pan-Slav record. Here we have Lachian and Moravian dances coupled with a work celebrating the belligerent exploits of Ukrainian Cossacks and their leader against the Poles, all played with evident exhilaration by a Polish conductor and orchestra. Taras Bulba of 1915 was, Janáček told a friend in 1918, his ‘musical testament’, even if he had by then somewhat revised his views about the Russians. It remains none the less a vigorous, original set of portraits of three heroic deaths, those of Taras’s two sons and his own death. Janáček does not make matters easy for his performers, with some unusual instructions and difficult balance, nor for the recording engineers, who only occasionally find details eluding them. The sound in general is warm and vivid, and Antoni Wit has a sure hand with all Janáček’s demands.

The six Lachian Dances (1924) are a selection from an earlier set of Valachian Dances (1889-91), music from neighbouring regions, and are vivid arrangements for full orchestra; the six Moravian Dances (not Janáček’s title) are a group taken from the ballet Rákoš Rákoczy by his publisher. Though they are early pieces, composed before the revelation of Jenůfa, they have much to indicate the direction Janáček’s thoughts were taking with the folk music of his native region. Fascinating to hear as versions of material that was feeding into his mature idiom, they are in their own right colourful and highly enjoyable pieces, relished here by the Polish players.