Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen was, says Simon Rattle in his booklet note, “the piece that made me want to become an opera conductor”. His affection for the work, with which he made his Covent Garden debut in 1990 (available on Chandos’s Opera in English series), is self-evident in this vital live recording with the London Symphony Orchestra in its Barbican Hall home from 2019.

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Comparisons between the two recordings are telling. Where the Chandos account finds Rattle leaning into the piece’s lyrical elements with Puccinian warmth, here he is clearly more interested in the darker, more dangerous undercurrents that...