We haven't seen a lot of Smetana's The Bartered Bride in the UK recently. Bohemia's best-loved opera is rapidly becoming one of the repertoire's best-kept secrets, which is a shame because it's an ...

So do we exchange jolly peasants for glowering apparatchiks? Hardly – this is as entertaining a version of Smetana’s opera as you could wish, but the celebration of Czech nationalism has extra edge ...

The School of Music's Lyric Opera Theatre is putting on a production of Bedřich Smetana’s "The Bartered Bride" on Sept. 27, 28, 30 and on Oct. 1. Dale Dreyfoos, professor of opera and music theater ...

And it has an anti-hero in the person of a youth with a stammer, who gets laughed at and ends up as a circus bear. The fact that the proposed sale is a trick to enable a genuine love match is the sort ...

Opera can sometimes sneak up on you. Granted, that’s an odd thing to say about an art form best known for high-decibel emoting. But longtime fans know it’s true. “A lot of the best operas take the ...

The Czechiest features of The Bartered Bride – cornerstone of Czech opera and the first to go international after premiering in 1866 – are in the music rather than the story or setting. No accident: ...

“My music is rhythmic because I am Czech… the natural music of the Czechs is rhythm – strong and agile rhythm.” (Martinů). How well the conductor Jac van Steen and the director Paul Curran understood ...

First staged in 1998, Daniel Slater’s production of Smetana’s Czech nationalist classic sets the action in the early 1970s. So, when the inhabitants of this Bohemian community urge one another to ...