If someone says "Smetana opera," you'll automatically think of The Bartered Bride. But Smetana wrote nine operas in all, impressive considering the fact that he had very few predecessors in the realm of Czech opera, and he preferred this one to The Bartered Bride and was a bit annoyed by the latter's consistent success. Dramatically, Dalibor is not the elegant marriage of words and music that The Bartered Bride is, but it's an extremely colorful score that looks both backward to Beethoven and forward to Dvorák and Janácek at the same time. The Beethoven element lies in the plot, an energetic, but unwieldy, tale of prison love and (failed) rescue. The music is melodically compelling, and the orchestration is often brilliant: sample the radiant Act I, Scene 3 (CD 1, track 5), where Milada, the eventual lover of the imprisoned Dalibor, at first accuses him of murder; her eventual transformation is hinted at in an entirely unusual way. The opera is held together with a network of meaning-bearing themes that got Smetana tagged with the charge of Wagnerianism (probably causing the opera's failure), but actually resemble the themes of Smetana's tone poem Ma Vlast. This performance was a concert reading made in London by Czech conductor Jiri Belohlavek, who has specialized in obscure Czech opera, and a collection of little-known, but excellent, singers. What is lost in the excitement of live performance is recaptured in the unusually good sound from Onyx here, and in all, this sounds a great deal like an opera that's ready for revival, with tunes that will stick with you after you finish listening.