Martinů’s short one-act operas make for a bright and entertaining double bill, and they receive bright and entertaining performances on this new recording from the Staatsoper Stuttgart under its music director Cornelius Meister. First up is Les larmes du couteau, a surreal farce from 1928 and the height of Martinů’s Paris period. The necrophiliac storyline (which features Satan and a dangling corpse) is all rather self-consciously épater les bourgeois but Martinů is enough of his own man to keep the influence of Stravinsky and Les Six in check. A banjo strums drolly through the chamber-size score; there are the usual foxtrots and at one point the heroine Eléonore slides into a sultry and distinctly Weill-ish song to the moon. This is the first time, apparently, that the opera has been recorded with the original French text and Elena Tsallagova, as Eléonore, makes it sound effortless.

The Comedy on the Bridge is a more substantial proposition, composed as a Czech radio opera in 1935 but revised and staged in the USA in 1951 in the English version that is recorded here. Václav Klicpera’s plot – four characters, in wartime, are given permission to step on to a bridge but are forbidden from leaving it – must have had a personal resonance for the much-exiled Martinů. And yet the musical-dramatic world that he creates is recognisably kin to Smetana and Janáček: the bickering sweethearts, the querulous schoolmaster and the lyrical, dancing warmth that offsets what might otherwise have been a very black comedy indeed. The ensemble cast here sounds fresh and committed, enunciating clearly while Meister finds both the bite and the tenderness in Martinů’s lilting melodies and toytown march tunes. A little gem.