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 ...

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 ...

Bedrich Smetana wrote music so clearly rooted in his Czech homeland that it would be easy to define him narrowly, as a musical nationalist. But in fact, his achievement goes far deeper than that.

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 ...

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 repertoire's best-kept secrets, which is a shame because it's an ...

Among the high points of Jiří Bělohlávek's tenure as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra were his annual revivals of Czech operas with singers predominantly drawn from the National ...

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 ...

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 ...

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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 ...