Director Paul Curran transfers Smetana’s comic masterpiece to 1950s England to create an irresistibly energetic production A generation ago, Smetana’s comic masterpiece could still be billed as the ...

In an Act One duet, Marenka and Jenik (Christiane Oelze and Ales Briscein) pledge their love, after learning that Marenka's parents have promised her to someone else. Marenka (Christiane Oelze) sings ...

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 ...

2 Video: RIDE THE CYCLONE at the Southwark Playhouse Elephant 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 ...

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 ...

Four fluttering doves, a flying bird's nest, white columns, hieroglyphs, the blue-haired Queen of the Night: after 25 years and 14 revivals English National Opera's classic staging of Mozart's The ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Marenka sings a far different duet in Act Two, seducing the hapless Vasek (Ales Voracek) without letting him know who she really is. Bedrich Smetana wrote music so clearly rooted in his Czech homeland ...

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, ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...