Supraphon’s booklet interview finds Jindřich Bálek chatting to Petr Popelka (the gifted Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra) about the Smetana repertoire featured in this musically rewarding set, and once they reach Má vlast suggests that many conductors prefer the hyper-dramatic third tone poem ‘Šárka’, about a leading Amazon figure in the ancient Czech legends of The Maidens’ War, to the sublimely flowing – and generally more popular – second piece, ‘Vltava’. ‘And I am such a one’, confesses Popelka, even though he considers the cycle’s fifth piece, ‘Tábor’, the finest in terms of composition.

Popelka’s sensitive handling of the yearning theme in ‘Šárka’ represents the love from the princely knight Ctirad, who Šárka deceives as a supposed captive. Throughout the piece countless quick-fire, filmic-style contrasts in mood, rhythm and colour lead, finally, to a solo clarinet signifying Šárka’s sleeping potion (the prominent bassoon represents the drugged men’s snoring) and the epic fist-shaking battle music that closes the movement, here with the all-important chattering woodwinds clearly audible. Semyon Bychkov and the Czech Philharmonic (Pentatone, 4/24) are dramatic in a quite different way, heavier, more emphatic but also full of feeling. As Edward Seckerson said when reviewing the disc: ‘There are precious few orchestras in the world with a sound and an identity as distinctly their own as the Czech Philharmonic. The passage of time has not changed that.’

The beauty of Popelka’s Prague RSO performance is that, although tension is maintained throughout each movement of Má vlast, textures remain transparent, which means that this most verdant of symphonic masterpieces never sounds enclosed. Neither does Popelka outlaw subtly employed expressive rubato or dynamics tweaked for the sake of clarity. This Má vlast is full of narrative incident, being lyrical and, where necessary, hard-hitting, its nearest CD rivals, interpretatively speaking, being Rafael Kubelík (in Munich – Orfeo, 5/85, 9/86) and Karel Šejna (Czech PO – Supraphon, 11/53). Popelka also finds delicacy in the score; for example, the eerie quiet fugue near the start of ‘From Bohemia’s Fields and Groves’, or the winds-led pastoral at around 2'26" into the grandly conclusive last tone poem, ‘Blaník’, leading to a quiet sustained bass pedal and exciting faster music (which at 6'14" sounds as if it’s about to transmogrify into Rezniček’s lively Donna Diana Overture!). Popelka doesn’t miss a trick: his is a sympathetic, all-embracing Má vlast, idiomatic, very well played and appropriately at one with the elements.

Of the remaining large-scale works featured, the earliest is also the least familiar, the so-called Triumph or Festive Symphony, composed to commemorate the wedding of Emperor Franz Joseph. The work was rejected by the Imperial Court, possibly on the grounds that the brief musical references to the Austrian national anthem (in the first, second and fourth movements) were not sufficiently prominent. Undeterred, in February 1855 Smetana hired an orchestra at his own expense to perform the symphony. Sadly, the work was coolly received, and the concert was a financial failure. Recordings-wise, Šejna’s bright and breezy Supraphon stereo recording with the Czech PO (3/96 – Popelka’s performance is similarly vivid) brings out the symphony’s most appealing elements, especially in the delightful Scherzo – a sort of extended Slavonic Dance – though, to be truthful, the Triumph Symphony is no unqualified masterpiece.

However, the other featured big work included definitely is – George Szell’s thoughtful and richly textured orchestration of the First String Quartet in E minor, From My Life (an arrangement that the great quartet leader Adolf Busch approved of, apparently), where Popelka’s approach dances and sings, until the tragic ‘deafness whistle’ (a high, sustained harmonic E on the first violins) intrudes into the finale, as shocking here as it is in the string quartet original. Szell’s own Cleveland recording (Sony Classical, in mono) is typically well drilled (as is the 1945 Boston SO premiere performance, which he also conducts – Somm), but Popelka’s recording sounds more authentically Czech than either.

The other featured works are the three ‘Gothenburg’ symphonic poems, Richard III, Wallenstein’s Camp and Hakon Jarl, where Smetana levels with the neo-Romantics (Liszt primarily) and proves his skill at handling large-scale musical forces. Pre-Má vlast they represent the best of him, orchestrally: at 4'37" into Wallenstein’s Camp, for example, where rugged modulations call on the low brass for effect (Kubelík’s Munich recording is perhaps best here – DG, 11/72) or the impassioned, almost insanely Romantic central episode of Hakon Jarl, which sounds if it was conjured on the spur of the moment – wonderful stuff! Popelka’s rivals here include Šejna (11/59), rightly rated by Popelka as up there alongside Karel Ančerl (who as it happens didn’t record the ‘Gothenburg’ works) and the rather more hefty-sounding Theodore Kuchar with the Janáček Philharmonic (Brilliant, 9/19, 9/23), who adds a number of Smetana’s zany short orchestral works but doesn’t include the Szell orchestration of From My Life. As to Má vlast, don’t forget Václav Talich and the Czech PO recorded live in 1939 in Nazi-occupied Prague, an incredibly moving experience (much favoured by Popelka) not to be missed under any circumstances. The choice is yours, but if Smetana’s principal orchestral works are your main requirement, no need to look further than here. This is a wholly excellent set, extremely well recorded.