“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 ...

The Vienna State Opera will present Bedřich Smetana’s beloved comic opera Die verkaufte Braut (The Bartered Bride) on March 31, 2026, as part of its spring repertory season, bringing one of the Czech ...

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 ...

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 ...

Czech composer Bedrich Smetana wrote his opera The Bartered Bride during a happy and productive period of his life. It's probably good that he was happy while he was writing it; the opera failed to ...

It’s a sure sign of disaster when the loudest cheer during an opera comes in response to a circus divertissement. Sadly, this was the case in this, the Royal Opera’s second revival of Francesca ...