Robert Perdziola’s unfussy costumes are, like the set, effective and unobtrusive. Conductor David Angus and the 13-member orchestra occupy that rear platform behind a gauze curtain, a good setup for the singers. The focus of Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’s minimal set is the stark staircase that descends from a rear platform to center stage. The BLO production runs a tight 110 minutes without intermission. There’s also a political dimension: In one scene all shout, “Down with Etruscans! Rome for the Romans,” and, at the end, Junius proclaims “I will rule.” (Of course, he’s the one who incited Tarquinius.) And then there’s the opera’s controversial Christian frame: a Male Chorus (Jesse Darden) and Female Chorus (Antonia Tamer) whose commentary attempts to bridge ancient and modern perspectives, explaining that “In His Passion, He is our hope.” That might seem to be Britten’s answer, and yet the Chorus’s final statement is right out of ancient Greece: “Now with worn words and these brief notes we try to harness song to human tragedy.” Lucretia, overcome with shame, reveals what happened with Collatinus and then stabs herself, whereupon the Romans overthrow the Etruscan monarchy and establish the glorious Roman Republic.
Lucretia’s husband, Collatinus, boasts of her virtue inflamed with desire, the king’s son, Tarquinius Sextus, rapes her. when Rome was ruled by the Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus. The Roman historian Livy, writing in the first century BC, describes Lucretia as a noblewoman around 510 B.C. So the admirably straightforward Boston Lyric Opera production at the Artists for Humanity EpiCenter in Fort Point is welcome, the more so since stage director Sarna Lapine lets the work’s many perplexities speak for themselves. Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera, which premiered at Glyndebourne in 1946, is the best-known musical treatment - which is not to say you can see it in Boston just any time. The rape of Lucretia has been commemorated countless times in the arts - most famously by Shakespeare’s narrative poemĪnd in the paintings by Botticelli and Titian.
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