Melissa Shippen as Marenka & Matthew Garrett as Jenik. Photo by Nan Melville.

This spring, the Juilliard Opera Center at the Juilliard School is treating its audiences to a spirited production of Bedrich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride (originally Prodaná Nev?sta), the Czech national opera, for three hearings, with conductor Mark Stringer and director Eve Shapiro presiding. The opera is sung in English poet Tony Harrison’s determinedly earthy, this-is-no-happy-peasant-operetta translation of Karel Sabi na’s libretto, a vernacular version commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for its 1978 revival of Bartered Bride.

Soprano Melissa Shippen and tenor Matthew Garrett are the appealing and lyrical romantic leads, Marenka, the bride, and Jenik, the ostensible barterer. Shippen’s heroine is aptly feisty when crossed, but delighted to pull the wool over the eyes of silly Vasek (Jeremy Little). She has a strong enough instrument to carry off this spinto part, complete with dramatic, disillusioned aria, “How dark the day” (“Ten lásky sen”). The three soprano-tenor collaborations, Shippen’s early love duet and later angry, fiercely Slavic exchange with Garrett’s Jenik and the comic encounter with his half-brother and putative rival, Little’s Vasek, are among the performance’s highlights. Little displays a solid voice and easy comic sense as the protagonist’s stammering, half-witted and childish suitor.

Matt Boehler proves light-voiced for the hefty basso buffo role of Kecal, the wheeling and dealing marriage broker, often the province of Wagnerians slumming. He was apparently instructed by Shapiro to play this wily individual as ditzier than expected from the start, undermining any surprise that he eventually gets hoodwinked. As Kecal’s clients, Matthew Worth and Amy Wallace-Styles, as Krusina and Ludmila, Marenka’s parents, and Daniel Billings, as Tobias Micha, Jenik and Vasek’s father, and Ronnita Nicole Miller as Háta, Vasek’s mother, particularly distinguish themselves in the dulcet, sometimes all but a cappella ensemble, “Think it over, Marenka” (“Rozmysli si, Marenko”), with the matchmaker and Marenka.

Tenor Javier Abreu smoothly dispatches the circus barker’s alliterative tongue twisters. Katherine Whyte makes a bright-voiced Esmeralda, his chief attraction, and David Salsbery Fry completes the cast as a droll “savage Red Indian,” “caught on Coney Island.”

Under Stringer’s baton, the villagers’ choruses and showpieces for the Juilliard Theater Orchestra, such as the rousing overture and the dances, shine. Other numbers have the necessary sweep, but the Maestro at times understandably restrains his forces so as not to swamp the young soloists in their demanding assignments. Guided by choreographer Jeanne Slater, the choristers do most dances themselves, which, fittingly, means they look like expressions of the populace, not the corps de ballet.

Shapiro and set designer Chris Barreca situate the action on a severely raked platform, adorned with a merry Maypole and backed by an angular partial cyclorama full of foliage. This mise-en-scčne puts one in mind of those stark, backlit Josef Svoboda Met productions from the 1970s (Carmen, Vespri Siciliani and Bartered Bride ). James Scott devised colorful folk and circus costumes, including one for dancing bear, and Matthew McCarthy designed the lighting.

Matthew Worth & Amy Wallace-Styles (left), Matthew Garrett & Melissa Shippen (right). Photo by Nan Melville.

Juilliard School, 60 Lincoln Center Plaza

April 27 & 29 at 8 pm & May 1 at 2 pm

Tickets $20 at box office or call CenterCharge 212/721-6500