Smetana and the librettist Karel Sabina masterfully mocked all those who expected the "national opera" to be an idyllic picture of the Czech countryside, with its inhabitants being virtuous and ...
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 ...
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 ...
Musically, Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride is marvellous, vivid, dance-infused work. In the second performance of the run, conductor Jac van Steen and the Philharmonia Orchestra were achieving ...
There is much to admire in Daniel Slater's The Bartered Bride, updating Smetana's 19th-century peasant marriage market to edgier times, a century on during the Prague Spring. The opening chorus, ...
The opening production of Garsington Opera’s 30th-anniversary season finds the festival at the top of its game. The Philharmonia – one of the world’s leading orchestras – is in the pit, with conductor ...
BOSTON — As I listen to the overture of Bedřich Smetana’s "The Bartered Bride" in preparation for my call with Boston Midsummer Opera music director and conductor Susan Davenny Wyner, I sense ...
There’s no shortage of movie musicals based on popular plays. Far fewer are based on operas. Max Ophüls’s rarely seen 1932 film “The Bartered Bride,” a seventy-six-minute, giddily inventive adaptation ...
With Sir Charles Mackerras at the helm, Smetana's Bartered Bride not only has a spring in her step, she's several inches off the ground for much of the duration. Mackerras isn't just well-versed in ...
Southeast Missouri State University's Department of Music hosted two performances of Bedric Smetana's 19th century opera, The Bartered Bride, on January 20, 2017 and January 22, 2017 at Donald C.