This is a scintillating collection. Les noces may be a work audiences either love or hate (is it a concert or dance piece, what is with the accompanying clangour of pianos and percussion – and where is the orchestra of Petrushka?) but I have loved it unconditionally since first encountering Robert Craft’s recording with the Gregg Smith Singers, Ithaca Concert Choir and Columbia Percussion Ensemble. As Richard Whitehouse noted in his Gramophone Collection (9/17), there are many fine accounts – that by James Wood was his pick – and this newcomer is worthy to rank with the best.

Lukáš Vasilek’s focus is to showcase the not inconsiderable virtuosity of the Prague Philharmonic Choir, with several soloists in all three works drawn from its ranks. In Les noces, the choir is the bedrock, on which the vocal and instrumental soloists – including the brilliant Amadinda Percussion Group – build so effectively. Vasilek’s tempos are measured but not sedate and the whole ensemble is superbly balanced. If there is no standout performer or element, unlike Daniel Reuss’s with the radiant Carolyn Sampson among the rivals listed below, that is not to this newcomer’s detriment; a recording more than the sum of its parts.

A wedding is the starting point for Bartók’s delightful, much briefer cantata Village Scenes (Falun, 1926), an arrangement of the final three songs of his earlier song set of the same name and, like Les noces, incorporating folk material. The Prague Philharmonic Choir are beautifully supported by their ad hoc chamber orchestra and a match for their Gramophone Award-winning rivals on Philips conducted by Iván Fischer, and better recorded than Dorati’s pioneering account. Vasilek’s tempos in the outer movements are not as pell-mell as Fischer’s, but with no lack of the sheer joy the music contains. So, too, in Janáček’s Nursery Rhymes (1925 26), a zippy sequence of 19 tiny settings that cannot fail to raise a smile. And there’s even a turnip wedding!