Garsington Opera’s 2026 festival ran from Verdi and Strauss to Monteverdi and Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in the Chilterns.
A new La traviata opened Garsington Opera’s 2026 festival at Garsington Opera at Wormsley, near Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire. Four productions ran from Wednesday 27 May to Saturday 25 July.
The company began in 1989, when Leonard Ingrams and his wife Rosalind staged opera in the garden of Garsington Manor, outside Oxford. After Leonard’s death it moved in 2011 to the Getty family’s Wormsley Estate in the Chilterns, into a pavilion built for it.
Garsington is one of the English country-house opera festivals, and two orchestras play there, the Philharmonia and The English Concert. Singers from its Alvarez Emerging Artists’ Programme form the chorus and cover principal roles.
Louisa Muller directed the Traviata, with Madison Leonard as Violetta and the artistic director Douglas Boyd conducting. Bruno Ravella’s Der Rosenkavalier cast Matilda Sterby as the Marschallin and Niamh O’Sullivan as Octavian, under Finnegan Downie Dear.
John Caird staged Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse with Laurence Cummings and The English Concert. The season ended with Gerald Barry’s 2011 setting of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Jack Furness and conducted by Boyd.
Seán Boylan, its Algernon, took the company’s Leonard Ingrams Award.