There is a moment in The Rape of Lucretia — just after Tarquinius has left and before Lucretia herself fully understands what has been done to her — where Britten’s chamber scoring achieves something almost unbearable in its delicacy. Eight strings, a handful of winds, harp, percussion: thirteen players in all. And yet the silence between the notes feels orchestral. That is Britten’s peculiar genius, and this album catches it.
The opera itself remains the most vexing of Britten’s stage works, which is saying something. He wrote it in 1946, the year after Peter Grimes had made him famous overnight, and in certain ways it shows him retreating from the exposed emotional terrain of that earlier masterpiece into a more formal, self-consciously literary structure. Ronald Duncan’s libretto is the culprit — or rather, the Christian frame Duncan insists on bolting to the outside of the story. The Male and Female Chorus aren’t merely narrators in the Greek sense; they are evangelists, forever insisting that Lucretia’s rape and suicide prefigure Christ’s suffering, that her degradation is somehow redeemable through theology. It’s a strange, strained argument, and Britten — who understood dramatic necessity as instinctively as any composer of his century — seems never to have fully questioned whether it served the work. It doesn’t. The interpolated Christian commentary doesn’t illuminate the action so much as it keeps interrupting it, throwing cold water on scenes that are already burning.
When the music is allowed simply to be music, Lucretia is extraordinary. The famous ride to Rome — Tarquinius’s horse galloping through the night toward his crime — generates propulsive, almost physical excitement through sheer rhythmic momentum and instrumental color. And the score’s quieter moments cut deeper still. Those harp harmonics evoking crickets in the opening scene, the low pizzicato glissandi in the bass that conjure bullfrogs croaking in the darkness — these are details so precise, so effortlessly right, that you wonder why anybody ever writes for a large orchestra at all.
Oliver Knussen is not a maestro one ordinarily associates with Britten’s theater. He has spent the better part of his career — justly celebrated — conducting his own music and that of his colleagues in the post-Messiaen generation. But here he turns out to be a natural. His tempos breathe. He understands that in a chamber opera, tension is built not through accumulated mass but through isolation — a single oboe line held a half-beat too long, a string chord released just before you expect it. The Aldeburgh Festival Ensemble plays with the kind of alert, lean transparency that Britten himself demanded from instrumentalists; these musicians know this sound world from the inside, and it shows in every phrase.
Ian Bostridge as the Male Chorus is simply indispensable. He is, as has been said by others, the closest thing we have to Peter Pears — not in timbre, exactly, but in the way he subordinates vocal display to textual meaning, the way a snarl or a sudden drop in dynamic can illuminate a word that a smoother tenor would merely decorate. His partnership with Pears and Britten, of course, runs only one direction through time — Bostridge inherits the tradition, he cannot have shaped it — but the inheritance is worn lightly, personally, convincingly.
Susan Gritton as the Female Chorus is harder to assess. Her voice is exquisite — warm, full, technically assured — but something in her approach keeps the emotional temperature slightly below where it needs to be. Next to Bostridge’s urgent engagement, she can seem at a remove from the drama, as though she is observing rather than participating. Whether this is a conscious interpretive choice or simply a matter of temperament I genuinely cannot say.
The central roles are well served. Angelika Kirchschlager brings real dignity and interior weight to Lucretia — she doesn’t sentimentalize the character’s final hours, which is the right instinct. Peter Coleman-Wright’s Tarquinius is menacing without being cartoonish, which matters. And Christopher Purves, as the cuckolded Collatinus, manages to make grief feel genuine rather than operatically inflated.
This is, in short, about as good a case as one could currently make for Lucretia on disc — played with scrupulous care, conducted with real dramatic intelligence, and cast from strength in the roles that most need strength. Whether the opera itself ultimately earns such advocacy is a question this recording honestly cannot answer. But it asks the question beautifully.
