Dennis Russell Davies and his musicians from the Czech Republic’s second city began a UK tour last night with an enterprising programme and a large and appreciative audience in Manchester.

Freddy Kempf as piano soloist was an undoubted part of the attraction, but he was not there to play a conventional concerto but to join the bouncing Czechs in their love of jazz idioms.

Between bouts of that far from shabby, still shocking masterpiece Tosca, Royal Opera music director Jakub Hrůša went for fleshcreep: too little of Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin – given a chorus, he could have done the half-hour ballet, not just the suite – and too much of a spooky thing in a big Dvořák cantata.

"Crazy comedy" was a recognised subgenre in post-war Czech cinema. Turn to this disc’s bonus features first and watch Michael Brooke’s video essay Those Crazy Czechs, an entertaining whistle-stop guide which piqued my curiosity about films such as You Are a Widow, Sir!, I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen! and How About a Plate of Spinach?

Serious realisation of the seven often thorny Martinů string quartets is a major undertaking. When I spoke to Veronika Jarůšková and Peter Jarůšek after an East Neuk Festival concert, they said they intended to do it slowly, with absolute commitment. Tuesday night’s performance of the stupendous Fifth sealed the pledge. It held central place in a concert which only brought relief from Czech grittiness with the great cathartic melodies in Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet.

Czech theatre theorist Ivo Osolsobě’s tick-list for what constitutes an "authentic" musical is quoted in this release’s booklet. Namely that the songs should advance the narrative and express characters’ feelings, that singing, dancing and acting are integral elements, and that the story is rooted in real life.

Three Wishes for Cinderella (Tři oříšky pro Popelku) is one of Czech cinema’s best-loved pohadky, or "fairy tales".

František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1966) has been voted the best Czech film ever made, a visionary 13^th century epic whose expense prompted its director to shoot the shorter, lower-budget The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) back-to-back with it.

How easy it is to fall instantly in love with the Dvořák Cello Concerto. And particularly when it is played by an orchestra as fine as the Czech Philharmonic.

What did they put in the water of Czechia’s central Bohemia/Moravia borderlands? From south to north there's Mahler’s birthplace in Kalište and the city of his youth, Jihlava; the Polička tower where Martinů was born; and finally the Litomyšl brewery which was Smetana’s first home (further east, Janáček and Freud were born six kilometres apart).

Happy End’s big draw is its central conceit, that of a convicted murderer narrating his life story backwards from the guillotine to the cradle. Made in 1967 by Oldfřich Lipský (1924-1986), renowned as a director of off-beat comedies, you wonder how on earth such a peculiar film was produced during such a turbulent time in Czechoslovak history.