Recordings of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen and Sinfonietta represent major milestones in Simon Rattle’s early discography: the latter with the Philharmonia as far back as 1983, the former with the forces of the Royal Opera House in 1990 (recorded by EMI but now part of Chandos’s Opera in English series).

In a brief note accompanying this new release, the conductor explains his personal link to Janáček’s wide-eyed and wondrous operatic masterpiece. It’s the work that first made him want to conduct opera at all, and one of few pieces that reliably reduces him to tears. This recording was made when Rattle performed the work in Peter Sellars’s semi-staging – a transfer from Berlin, where it was unveiled at the Philharmonie in 2017 – at the Barbican. And in his note, Rattle also explains their decision to stick here with the original Czech, to preserve the ‘rhythms of the language’ that are so central to the music.

I wasn’t too enamoured of Sellars’s gritty, urban vision of the work when I saw it in Berlin but it seems both there and in London to have informed Rattle’s vision of the score. With pinpoint playing from the LSO and close, detailed recorded sound, this is a Vixen with sharp teeth as well as sharp ears. Instead of the inviting, dewy soundscapes conjured up by, say, Mackerras’s Vienna Philharmonic, we have something a little more threatening. It’s a performance compelling in its urgency and vividness, hiding none of the uncanny moments of the score but still breaking out into climaxes of great tenderness, sensual power and beauty – listen to the wonderful second interlude, here with irresistibly soaring strings, swelling woodwind and exultant brass.

The sense of dramatic vividness is conveyed superbly by the cast, led by Lucy Crowe’s impulsive Vixen, brimming with joie de vivre and mischief and singing with airy ease. Gerald Finley’s Forester is outstanding, too, presenting a moving mixture of wisdom and resignation – and we only have a couple of audible traces of Sellars’s concept of the role as rather unappealingly depressive.

Sophia Burgos is a vibrantly sung, ardent Fox, and the smaller roles, distributed among the rest of the cast, are all well taken, with Jan Martiník’s world-weary Parson and Hanno Müller-Brachmann’s Harašta especially fine. There are charming performances from the younger members of the cast, and the choruses are excellent, even if they sound a little rushed as the Voices of the Forest at the end of Act 2. Some evidence of the semi-staging remains in the recording but the engineering, though close, is good.

The generous coupling is every bit as compelling: a taut account of the Sinfonietta that bristles with nervous energy and exultant joy. As with the Vixen, it’s a performance that also fully articulates the work’s more unsettling side, and, while there are similarities with Rattle’s earlier account, the playing from the LSO is on a different level: superbly incisive and standing up to the close scrutiny of the recorded sound. All in all, an outstanding release, and a rewarding celebration of this wonderful composer’s art.