Smetana: The Bartered Bride, Gritton, Clarke, Robinson, Rose

Although Chandos’s Opera in English series officially celebrates its tenth birthday this year, its roots stretch back thirty years or more, when the Peter Moores Foundation began to sponsor English-language opera recordings in association with EMI. These, including Reginald Goodall’s superb ENO Ring, have resurfaced under the Chandos banner. Many of the recordings employed “local” artists, usually associated with ENO. More recently, major stars have been engaged, perhaps a consequence of the relative rarity of opera recordings these days. For instance, the recent Chandos Fidelio featured Christine Brewer in the title role, you could hardly do better today.

Opera in English also features a star conductor in Sir Charles Mackerras, whose credits reflect his enormous range of interests and include operas from Handel (a magnificent Julius Caesar with Janet Baker) to Janáček. The Bartered Bride has been a significant gap in Sir Charles’s Czech discography, and having badgered various people at Decca for years to make a Czech-language version with him, I’m delighted that he has had the chance to record it prior to a run of performances at the Royal Opera House in January.

The cast for the recording is similar, though not identical, to the Covent Garden cast, and it’s a very good one. Susan Gritton is a peachy Marenka, Peter Rose brings his larger-than-life personality to the role of the devious lawyer Kecal, and Tim Robinson, a versatile and likeable singer, makes a sympathetic figure of the stuttering mummy’s boy Vašek. Kit Hesketh-Harvey (one half of Kit and the Widow) has made a witty, singable translation and makes a cameo appearance as a cockney Indian. The chorus of the ROH will probably sound punchier on stage than it does here (recording engineers have a horror of catching individual voices in choral recordings, and so consequently choruses tend to sound too distant).

Beginning with an electrifying performance of the Overture (a fiendishly difficult piece and the downfall of many an amateur Bartered Bride), Sir Charles presides over a marvellous account of the score. The purely orchestral numbers, the Overture and Dance of the Comedians, are packed with detail and incident, and such moments as the final bars of the Marenka/Jeník duet are as affectionate as can be, with the gentle woodwind lines lovingly dwelt on. Chandos’s booklet includes lots of photos of the current Covent Garden and Glyndebourne productions as well as an essay by Dennis Marks.