In a narrative driven by male vanity, military might and sexual malice, Benjamin Britten’s 1946 chamber opera “The Rape of Lucretia” reaches one of its most memorable scenes in an unexpected and inspired way when three women gather, folding linen.

In the Merola Opera Program production that had the first of two performances Thursday, July 13, at Herbst Theatre, the young singers in the esteemed training program closely associated with the San Francisco Opera carried it off with fluid, quietly emphatic grace. Anxious about a husband who’s off at war and afraid she won’t be able to sleep, the titular tragic heroine (mezzo-soprano Natalie Lewis as Lucretia) enlisted her nurse Bianca (mezzo-sopano Simona Genga) and maid Lucia (soprano Olivia Prendergast) in this domestic distraction. Soprano Caroline Corrales, as one of two Chorus narrators, added the final voice in a softly sublime quartet.

通过折叠床单,得体,forebodingly black ones — in strictly coordinated moves, the women forged a telling feminine counterpoint to the military maneuvers of the male battlefield. An eerie sense of fate lingered as the women put away their linens and went to bed, misleadingly coddled by purring woodwinds.

Indeed, as Corrales and her Male Chorus counterpart (tenor Chance Jonas-O’Toole) had warned, some serious trouble would soon arrive. It came in the form of Tarquinius (baritone Samuel Kidd), bent on assaulting Lucretia to avenge his own wife’s infidelity. “Toxic masculinity” may not have been a phrase in use by Britten or librettist Ronald Duncan, but it’s a pretty fair measure of the churning engine they put in motion. (The libretto is based on a play by French playwright André Obey, who gained prominence in the 1940s.)

The Merola production, directed by Jan Essinger and conducted by Judith Yan, had its share of musical and theatrical strengths. The first to emerge were the opera’s single-voice choruses. Dressed in contemporary street clothes and paging through a book, as if they were retrieving this dark tale from Roman history, Corrales and Jonas-O’Toole sang Duncan’s figurative and sometimes formidable English-language text with urgent clarity. The latter’s account of the rapist’s desperate horseback ride was especially keen.

The principals, wearing Christine Crook’s classically inflected costumes, had their moments to shine. After a somewhat murky opening ensemble scene for the preening men, Lucretia’s rapist and her husband, Collatinus (bass-baritone James McCarthy), made strongly etched impressions later on. His voice thickened by lust to an insinuating burr, Kidd’s Tarquinius stalked Lucretia like a stealthy predator. Once inside her bedchamber, he shucked off his long coat with its animal pelt collar and prepared to strike. Arriving too late to prevent the crime, and then helpless to stop Lucretia’s abrupt suicide, McCarthy made Collatinus a man consumed, in wounded voice and bearing, by grief.

Lewis, her voice blooming open, was both stately and hauntingly detached after the rape, which was staged downstage in bright light with unblinking directness. Genga made the most of Bianca’s lines with her stirring, full-textured mezzo. Prendergast’s silvery soprano added a sprightly high range to the mix.

Britten’s orchestral score got an uneven reading by Yan and the 14 musicians in the pit. While some of the pointillist touches landed well — a neurotically recurring harp figure, a premonitory timpani, the consoling woodwinds — cohesion and certainty wavered elsewhere.

A misguided set design, by Sonja Füsti, compromised the action. Shrouded in a dark tarp at the outset, the topography of Collatinus and Lucretia’s abode was defined by pieces of furniture (bare bookshelves, chests, a padded office chair) pushed together as if in a storage unit. The performers had to pick their way precariously and awkwardly over the uneven surfaces. The set’s showy deconstruction at the end, preceded by showers of flower-petal confetti, was too much too late.

Over spare but probing music in its closing scene, the opera poses existential questions about the story’s meaning and offers Christian forgiveness as a balm. To this leap of spiritual faith, the Merola production added another pointed, moving touch: Rising from the spot where she died, Lucretia picked up the Chorus members’ book and slowly walked offstage with it. Raped, shamed and dead by her own hand in a male-dominated world, she was reclaiming her own story.

Steven Winn is a freelance writer.