Sunny delight | 6 June 2019

So it’s the start of the summer opera season at Wormsley and we’re sitting there in evening dress in the middle of the Getty estate, looking at a beautifully detailed replica of a rundown English village hall. It’s superbly done: the canvas chairs and austerity-drab paintwork in Paul Curran’s new production of The Bartered Bride could surely have been found in any number of church halls in this corner of the Chilterns, at least in the 1950s when this production seems to be set. And then, having gone to painstaking lengths to relocate this definitive Slav national opera to rural England, Garsington flips our expectations straight back at us and has it sung in Czech.

Well, it wouldn’t be country-house opera without a few absurdities. The choice of language was, I believe, the preference of the conductor Jac van Steen, and a less dogmatic maestro you’ll never find. Smetana said that The Bartered Bride was ‘only a toy’, and it’d be a joyless soul who didn’t come away smiling from Curran’s sunny, vividly peopled world, with its gauche vicar, industrious district nurse and Brylcreemed rockers. The set for Act One provides both a public space for maypole dancing and matchmaking and a separate kitchen for more intimate confessions, generally delivered while buttering corned-beef sandwiches. Act Three’s circus stage, meanwhile, could have come straight out of the most traditional of Prague productions (the circus performers themselves sent the post-picnic audience wild).

My only major reservation, barring some splashy brass playing from the Philharmonia, was that all this activity left you unsure where to look, at least in the choral and dance scenes. It snapped brightly into focus whenever the young lovers Jenik (a bluff, hipster-bearded Brendan Gunnell) and Marenka (Natalya Romaniw) were together.