THE sixth Lismore Music Festival takes place at the weekend. It’s Ireland’s only summer opera festival, competing with the well-established English Glyndebourne and other mid-European events.

"A rotted body politic riven with lies and factions and a sense that debauchery, despotism and tyranny governs all," is how director, Michael Barker-Caven describes the background of The Rape of Lucretia.

Opera director Michael Barker Caven tells Colette Sheridan how The Rape of Lucretia still has much to say about sexual violence in war.