Philip KENNICOTT JanRek's genius lies in his writing for orchestra - and some new suites offer the chance to enjoy the highlights

I've never made a philistine confession in these pages that I didn't ultimately regret. But that won't stop me now. Here's another, sure to be lamented when better sense returns: the big problem with JanãCek's operas is the vocal writing.

the ungainly vocal intervals that make so many fine singers sound strained, and the "speech melodies", supposedly derived from the inherent musical patterns in spoken Czech that remain mysterious and meaningless to those of us who don't speak Czech.

I should also distinguish between the effect of JanãCek's vocal writing as part of the whole package — in the 8 theatre, as part of a drama — versus the effect it has purely as music. A good production of a JanãCek opera can move me as much as anything the opera house has to offer. And if I sit down and listen through his operas with text booklet in hand I'm often transported, perhaps even more than in the opera house. But when it comes to casual listening, I find myself choosing my JanãCek rather selectively. And alas, things tend to head downhill after the overture or prelude, when all those people start yammering in Czech.

And so, Peter Breiner to the rescue. Breiner is a composer and arranger who has an interesting habit of becoming newsworthy every four years, when the Summer Olympics are held. In 2004, during the Athens games, he made news when his arrangements of the world's national anthems were held up for criticism by people who found the strangest hidden messages in his orchestrations. The US national anthem was subject to particular opprobrium because, in the view of some listeners, it was insufficiently bellicose and martial in its instrumental choices. Ah, the good old days, before the waning of the American imperium. When we had time to fret about these things

Fast forward four years and Breiner was again in the news when the arrangements made for Athens were borrowed (without payment or acknowledgement) by the organisers of the

But that's all beside the point. The good news is that Breiner has applied his arranging skills to the operas of JanãCek, and the result is a recording of two orchestral suites, one devoted to jentifa and the other to The Excursions of Mr Broui=ek. They are a new guilty pleasure.

Why guilty? Because in general I don't endorse this sort of thing All those symphonic syntheses of great operas, or recordings with title such as "opera without words", are basically vandalism. Wagner, of course, is a particular victim of these efforts, and you might say he opened himself up to it by writing at such ridiculously long-winded length. But I've never heard a purely orchestral arrangement of Wagner highlights that wasn't distinctly unsatisfying. You feel the victim of a pernicious tour guide whose goal is to race you through the museum in under an hour. Without the boredom, the connective tissue that goes on ad nauseum, Wagner highlights feel strangely orphaned. When strung together they sound merely pompous, overheated and saturated with sugar and fat and everything bad for you.

But I can make an exception for these JanãCek suites. JanãCek wrote wonderfully for the orchestra, no matter what well-intentioned but misguided contemporaries may have thought. The obsessive repetition, the nervous energy, the strange shadings and dark harmonies, the proto-minimalist effects are the main reason we love his music, which sounds convincingly modern and folksy at the same time. Breiner's skilful arrangements retain all of that delight.

But JanãCek's operas often feel like a play enacted on the surface of the orchestra, not irrelevant to its commentary, but a kind of shadow drama separate from it. The first few minutes of every JanãCek opera create a new world, and it's the orchestra that does the work. The voices are merely feeling in the details, spinning out the story.

This is coming perilously close to heresy about the greatness of JanãCek. If you can separate the music and words from each other so easily, and indeed effectively, can we still consider JanãCek a great opera composer?

I think JanãCek probably gets too much credit for his choice of complex and often deep texts, which is proof more of his literary taste than any particular operatic skill. Some composers (Puccini and Verdi come to mind) can transform lousy literature into great opera. JanãCek's skill was more about translating very fine literature into equally fine opera. The vocal writing never lessens or hinders the power of the drama, but it rarely elevates or transcends it, either.

If that's pure philistinism on my part, so be it. It isn't the first time, and it won't be the last. (le