If it were not for Janácek's passion for Kamila Stösslová, the sustained creative outburst of his 60s and the masterpieces for which he is most celebrated might never have been written. While something of Kamila is embodied in the characters she inspired, a certain mystery still surrounds this woman, who was young enough to have been the composer's granddaughter.

Included in this recital by pianist William Howard were the fragments of music from the Album for Kamila (dating from 1927-8, Janácek's final year), a sort of private visitor's book recording the feelings and thoughts of every meeting (encounter is too loaded a word for their apparently chaste relationship). Both the music and the readings and explanations by John Tyrrell, the foremost Janácek academic, had the audience spellbound. Yet the album reveals nothing that could not be assumed from the operas; instead, the fascination was in the little intimacies implied, the dreams captured in the often brief phrases, pregnant with meaning and the potential for more elaborate development. The very juxtaposition of verbal and musical ideas offered a rare insight into the artistic process.

Equally seminal at an earlier stage in Janácek's career was his commitment to the folk music of his native Moravia, but in the late reflowering of interest represented in the 15 Moravian Folksongs of 1922, Kamila seems to be present, too. Howard's interpretation vividly coloured the impulsive, earthy nature of melody and harmony, while the pungent rhythms and broken-off phrases also related in retrospect to the immediacy of the album. Perhaps inevitably, that emotional spontaneity made Janácek's earlier cycles, In the Mists, and On the Overgrown Path, sound even more introspective and heart-wrenching.