As something of a preamble to this year’s Bard Music Festival, devoted to the Czech master Bohuslav Martinů (“Martinů and His World,” to be presented at Bard College over two weekends, August 8-10 and 14-17), this year’s Bard SummerFest, now in progress, will offer the U.S. stage debut of Bedřich Smetana’s 1868 opera “Dalibor” in four performances, beginning this weekend at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, July 25 at 6:30 p.m., July 27 at 2 p.m., July 30 at 2 p.m., and August 1 at 4 p.m.
If it sounds enticing, but you can’t make it, the July 30 matinee will be available for livestreaming, in real-time, with an encore broadcast on August 2 at 5 p.m. There’s more information at the “Dalibor” link below.
Smetana is regarded as the father of Czech national music, his immediately identifiable sound an inspiration to Dvořák and those who followed.
His best-known opera, by far, is “The Bartered Bride,” with its rousing overture and rustic dances. Also, I’ll wager you can’t listen to classical radio for a week without encountering “The Moldau,” the second of the collection of symphonic poems that comprise the composer’s epic patriotic tableau “Ma Vlast” (“My Country”).
“Dalibor” is very far from “The Bartered Bride.” It’s a drama, for one thing, full of Teutonic iconography: medieval castles, minnesingers, and resourceful damsels. There’s some “Lohengrin” in it, and some “Fidelio.” (The heroine disguises herself as boy in order spring the man she loves from imprisonment.) Having attended performances of Richard Strauss’ “Guntram” and Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in recent weeks, you’d think I’d have had enough of this sort of thing, but no!
At any rate, Smetana’s music, despite the scenic trappings, is unmistakably Czech to its core. Hey, the Czech lands have their castles too. “Dalibor” was tepidly received at its premiere, but it gained traction following the composer’s death and its significance is now deemed to be considerable among Smetana’s countrymen. Although programmed in Europe, in its early years performed throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by Gustav Mahler, among others, it has yet to make it to these shores.
It was Bard president and festival artistic co-director Leon Botstein who oversaw the presentation of “Guntram” at Carnegie Hall in June, with the American Symphony Orchestra. Conductor and orchestra will also take part in these performances of “Dalibor.” On top of everything else, Botstein has been music director of the ASO since 1992.
The production was to have been headlined by the Czech tenor Ladislav Elgr and Polish soprano Izabela Matula, but due to visa issues, some talented Americans have stepped up to address the challenges of learning what must be for them new roles in an uncommon language. Slavic opera is much less frequently encountered here than Italian, German, and French.
But don’t for a moment think that you’ll be getting shortchanged. I was at the performance of “Guntram” at Carnegie, featuring tenor John Matthew Myers, and I can attest that anyone who attends “Dalibor” will be in for a real treat. This guy has a clarion voice, with a warm, radiant tone, guaranteed to fill the entire house. Soprano Cadie J. Bryan is unfamiliar to me, but she has received praise for her radiance and vocal luster. I’m very much looking forward to hearing her as Mlada. Glancing through the rest of the cast, I also recognize bass-baritone Alfred Walker, another Botstein favorite (among other things, he sang the title role in Bard’s production of Saint-Saens’ “Henri VIII”). He’ll return as King Vladislav.
The stage director is Jean-Romain Vespirini (also the director of “Henri VIII”). There are two endings to the work, both of them tragic. Which one will be used?
Botstein and Bard are all about resurrecting unusual and neglected repertoire. Other rarely-encountered operas revived at Bard include Ernest Chausson’s “Le roi Arthus,” Dvořák’s “Dmitrij,” Korngold’s “Das Wunder der Heliane,” Meyerbeer’s “La prophète,” Anton Rubinstein’s “Demon,” and Ethel Smyth’s “The Wreckers,” among many others.
For anyone in search of a little respite from Puccini, Verdi, Wagner, Mozart, and the four or five others who dominate the world’s opera houses, Bard’s offerings are like manna in a desert of seemingly endless repetition.
Smetana’s “Dalibor” at Bard SummerScape
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/dalibor/
Bard Music Festival, “Martinu and His World”
Some of the past Bard operas are available for streaming here
Fisher Center at Bard
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