Daniel Slater’s production of Smetana’s great nationalistic opera has been one of Opera North’s most popular successes in recent years. Though the staging is over 15 years old, the concept has hardly dated, given that it was meant to appear dated in the first place.
The Bartered Bride is not so much an opera as a three-act national anthem in which Smetana sought to express the proudest aspects of the Czech psyche. Slater’s version concentrates on the period when the Czech soul was under the cosh; with the bucolic setting transferred to a dispiriting 1970s eastern-bloc backdrop of ugly pylons and unflattering polyester.
It’s not as dreary as it sounds - Robert Innes Hopkins’s set is actually quite festive, even if the bunting is emblazoned with hammers and sickles. And Slater’s approach pays dividends in its refusal to take the effervescent jollity of the music at face value: the opening chorus is no longer a spontaneous song of praise, but a grimly enforced choir practice in which it is clear that the villagers are singing through gritted teeth.
The revival luxuriates in one of the strongest casts to date. Kate Valentine’s Marenka possesses not only a thrillingly charismatic voice, but the only pair of denim jeans in this corner of eastern Europe, which must increase her market value exponentially. Brenden Gunnell brings a muscular heldentenor tone to the role of her lover, Jenik, which is a little like applying a sledgehammer to a walnut, though his intentions turn out to be more genuine than his dodgy leather jacket. Turning the bumptious village mayor into a smug party apparatchik is perhaps the most successful transposition of all, marvellously realised by James Creswell’s oleaginous bass. There’s even a built-in excuse for the gratuitous fun poked at Nicholas Watts’s stammering Vasek, as the concept predates political correctness by a good 20 years.
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