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’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 ...

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 ...

Last year, Boston Midsummer Opera presented Otto Nicolai’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” which is based on the Shakespeare play. This year, the company’s ninth season, we’re getting another ...

3 Photos: New Look At JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR West End Starring Sam Ryder and More 4 Review: JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, Starring Sam Ryder We haven't seen a lot of Smetana's The Bartered Bride in the UK ...

Nicely timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Sir Peter Moore’s ‘Opera in English’ series comes this outstanding new version of The Bartered Bride. By almost any reckoning, this is the most ...

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 ...