“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 ...

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 ...

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: ...

Although in The Bartered Bride Smetana largely avoided the direct quotation of folksong, the music he composed was considered to be Czech in spirit, meaning that he succeeded in his aim of creating a ...

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 ...

Young Mařenka is madly in love with Jeník, but her father has a better catch in mind for her... From Prague’s National Theatre, Czech film and stage director Alice Nellis revisits Bedřich Smetana’s ...