Eugen Suchoň’s early Balladic Suite (1935) here receives its third recording that I can trace, curiously as it is the weakest of the three scores gathered so attractively here. ‘Powerfully atmospheric and moving though it is – and excellently composed’, according to Deryck Cooke’s assessment of it back in 1961 (with which I concur), Suchoň still lay in Novák’s shadow, and his best works were yet to come.

The two couplings are two of ‘his best’, dating from the 1950s and revealing him in full maturity, not least in his enchanting command of orchestration. This is heard to maximum advantage in the opening (and longest) work, Metamorphoses (1953), a vibrant orchestral concerto vividly scored, leaping off the page the way its ponderous subtitle (‘Variations on Original Themes in the Form of a Suite for Orchestra’) does not. Suchoň’s Slovak heritage is attractively displayed in five movements of increasing power and complexity. Järvi’s account with the superlative Estonian National Symphony Orchestra fair fizzes with excitement, outpacing Ko≈ler’s older Slovak rival (which, by the by, still sounds very well) by almost five minutes; the Estonians are fleeter and more sure-fingered than either rival orchestra in the Balladic Suite, too.

While Suchoň’s harmonic idiom was subtly radical, based on extended tonality, he was at heart a traditionalist, as can be heard in the Symfonietta rustica (1955 56), an at times impressionistic expansion of a piano sonatina. Suchoň’s modal writing is sometimes fleetingly reminiscent of the English pastoralists, even Vaughan Williams, and this brief, pithy Symfonietta will appeal to all lovers of 20th-century British music as much as to Slovakophiles. Superb sound and performances throughout make this the reference recording for Suchoň outside the operas and the perfect introduction to his art. Recommended.