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 on the Wormsley Estate, a season of four productions that 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. Following Leonard’s death it moved in 2011 to the Getty family’s Wormsley Estate in the Chilterns, where a pavilion built for it looks out over the park. Two orchestras play there, the Philharmonia and The English Concert.
Garsington is one of the English country-house opera festivals. Around the season it runs a youth company, work with schools and the Alvarez Emerging Artists’ Programme, whose young singers form its chorus and cover its principal roles.
Louisa Muller directed the Traviata, with Madison Leonard as Violetta, Oleksiy Palchykov as Alfredo and Douglas Boyd, the artistic director, conducting the Philharmonia. Bruno Ravella’s Der Rosenkavalier cast Matilda Sterby as the Marschallin, Niamh O’Sullivan as Octavian and Soraya Mafi as Sophie, under Finnegan Downie Dear. John Caird staged Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse with Laurence Cummings and The English Concert, with Ed Lyon and Cecelia Hall leading the cast. 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.