https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances daily 0.75 2026-02-17 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/leo-janek-katya-kabanova monthly 0.5 2026-02-17 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/bluebeards-castle-876a3 monthly 0.5 2025-12-16 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/bluebeards-castle monthly 0.5 2025-12-16 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/britten-peter-grimes-e83wx monthly 0.5 2025-10-22 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/britten-peter-grimes monthly 0.5 2025-06-16 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/two-english-song-cycles-s9khd monthly 0.5 2024-09-18 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/wagner-and-other-matters monthly 0.5 2024-10-22 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/benjamin-britten-billy-budd monthly 0.5 2024-10-30 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/rzbmoylnipklr1e3vv8o5nmnzh9aj8 monthly 0.5 2024-07-25 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/two-english-song-cycles monthly 0.5 2024-07-26 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/wagner-and-schoenberg monthly 0.5 2023-03-13 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/britten-albert-herring monthly 0.5 2023-03-15 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/a-kind-man monthly 0.5 2023-06-12 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/mahler-arr-schoenberg-das-lied-von-der-erde monthly 0.5 2021-08-30 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/wagner-prelude-act-2-liebestod monthly 0.5 2021-08-30 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/wagner-act-1-complete-the-ride-of-the-valkyries-act-3-finale monthly 0.5 2021-08-30 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/strauss-ariadne-auf-naxos monthly 0.5 2021-08-30 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/wagner-tannhuser-overture-and-venusberg-scene-listz-dante-symphony monthly 0.5 2024-11-25 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/the-turn-of-the-screw monthly 0.5 2021-09-29 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/performances/lucretia2020 monthly 0.5 2021-12-13 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/who-we-are daily 0.75 2025-03-01 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/join-mailing-list daily 0.75 2026-03-02 https://www.newpalaceopera.com/mikethorne daily 0.75 2021-09-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e2c20b0147142225ae7a6ba/1632577688964-NKFED1PL2K21M66XCLQC/Botticelli%2BLucretia%2Btwitter.jpg The Rape of Lucretia - the conductor https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e2c20b0147142225ae7a6ba/1632577525311-J4JREBEFIB6CCGOPMQDB/Mike%2BThorne.jpg The Rape of Lucretia - the conductor - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.newpalaceopera.com/rebecca-feature daily 0.75 2020-02-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e2c20b0147142225ae7a6ba/1581250236480-1MZPHIYIM9AWNBQVL88Q/Rebecca+Afonwy-Jones%C2%A9TimDunk2017-11.jpeg The Rape of Lucretia - the heroine - From Livy to Gareth Malone – Britten’s Lucretia follows our intrigue with military wives What women do when their menfolk are away saving nations and seeking glory has been regularly explored in literature and film, but also examined and retold in opera. As a device for examining fidelity and exploring jealousy, the story of a soldier and his love is a familiar one – will she betray her true love for another? Mozart reports a one-all draw with Fiordiligi and Dorabella, while Fauré’s Pénélope holds it together for ten years waiting for Ulysses to find his way home. Brunnhilde is dragged off her burning rock, Desdemona meets her end through Otello’s jealousy, and the list goes on, to Wozzeck’s Marie lying dead by the lake. One particularly heartbreaking example of a tragic woman in war is Britten’s Lucretia. Rebecca Afonwy-Jones will sing the title role in The Rape of Lucretia for New Palace Opera’s upcoming concert performance and discusses its challenges and how it looks at the place of women in the military machine. There are many things that opera is good at re-examining. Lucretia’s war-torn story easily transports to modern times, when husbands are away in the armed forces and military women are left on their own. You can completely identify with her vulnerability as she has become part of warfare vernacular. Lucretia comes in late in the opera, a lot of action has taken place with the men before she makes an appearance, which creates masses of tension. You have very little time to say who Lucretia is before the horror of Tarquinius breaking into her room and her subsequent rape. And of course she knew Tarquinius so she couldn’t refuse him entry to her home, despite the late hour. In Livy’s Ancient Rome, she was a victim and I think she was in 1946 when it was written. As we are singing in a concert, we have a different opportunity to ask if it isn’t a binary question of whether she is or isn’t a victim? But when she emerges after the rape, she isn’t histrionic, her only power is to show her horror. Lucretia brings Carmen to mind in the way that she dies in defiance. She has no other option because society doesn’t allow her another answer. That is the only power she wields. So I want to give a voice to Lucretia’s struggle, not just to say what happens. While 1946 isn’t that long ago, when you look at Weinstein and the way that society has evolved, the music and the text of this story are even more important than ever, so we have to bring the text right to the fore. It immediately gets my blood up when you think of a woman like Lucretia being tested, and it still remains in society. We have an obsession with fallen and wronged women and that takes us back to Carmen, to Lulu, to Violetta. It is like we are trying over and over to explore and judge those women in contemporary societies and how we react as today’s audiences. As a singer, that is the challenge, but if you are performing in a concert, it is a more stark setting. It is just you, the orchestral sound and the audience. Our production can allow us to show the text in a very different, lucid way. Then we, as performers, place the onus on the audience and we demand, we require them to imagine the action in their minds and that can arguably produce a more powerful performance. https://www.newpalaceopera.com/matthew-sharp daily 0.75 2020-03-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e2c20b0147142225ae7a6ba/1584357317552-OESM1PUO4FQBEWFKB9PZ/Matthew+Sharp.jpg Matthew Sharp Singers usually only have one chance to perform a role – they take what they learn to inform other lovers, heroes, kings, or for one man, rapists. So it is unusual for a singer to have a gap of 20 odd years to revisit a work, but for the second run, wearing a completely different hat. Matthew Sharp, baritone and cellist, sings Tarquinius in New Palace Opera’s upcoming The Rape of Lucretia, a work he already knows very well. While this will be his first Britten singing gig, Sharp first directed it when he was 19. “I have this piece in my DNA as a director and it is fabulous to come back to it in this guise as the irresistible, repellent, dastardly prince.” Along the way, Sharp has had the dubious opportunity of playing another rapist in Wallen’s The Silent Twins. As a young director, he formed a strong, 19-year-old’s view of Tarquinius, “However, opinions, hearts and minds change so it is great to get inside it from a singer’s perspective and see how I feel about it today.” Sharp continued in his own words. All those years ago, I was drawn to Tarquinius’s predatory and conflicted ways and why Britten was putting this on the stage. I always thought that Tarquinius’s music was completely intoxicating and compelling. The libretto always struck me though, and still does, as self-consciously literary which can hold the horror of the act at arm’s length – I suppose the humanity is something I feel more deeply as an older man. I know victims of rape and their stories are at the heart of my approach to the role. The opera finds Tarquinius in a dark vortex. Excess whoring, excess murder – he’s reached a place of oblivion and numbness. So he’s looking in the opera for meaning, a way out of the abyss. But the only tools he has are desire and power, and entitlement and the habit of conquest. ‘Within this Frail Crucible of Light’ is a moment of exquisite beauty in the music as he watches the sleeping Lucretia. He wants to go back to his essence, his fountainhead, perhaps a time when original sin was his only stain – he wants his birth and his soul again. It’s a stripping away for a brief moment of all the accoutrements of being a powerful and corrupted prince. He’s look for purity, and the purity and virtue of Lucretia is intoxicating, and beholding that radiance draws this extraordinary ballad from him. So now I am looking for what drives Tarquinius and what is fundamental to his trajectory in the story and why he ends up in that position and in that act of violation. 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