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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...