Garsington Opera runs its 2027 season at the Wormsley Estate from Wednesday 26 May to Wednesday 28 July. Full casting is published in October 2026.
Leonard Ingrams started Garsington Opera in 1989 in the garden of his own house, an Oxfordshire manor that had been Ottoline Morrell’s and the Bloomsbury group’s before him. It ran there for twenty-one summers. After his death the company had to move, and since 2011 it has been at Wormsley, the Getty family’s estate in the Chilterns, in a pavilion built for it that opens onto the park and holds six hundred people.
That is the whole proposition. Six hundred seats is small enough that the singers are not pushing, and a purpose-built temporary structure in a deer park is a different evening from an opera house, and it is what the country-house festivals are actually selling. It commissions new work, runs a youth company, and gives young British singers principal roles two or three years before the larger houses will, which is the practical reason to watch its casting.
The 2027 season runs from Wednesday 26 May to Wednesday 28 July. Full details including casting are published in October 2026, so the dates go on sale before the season is cast: take the dates now and read the casting when it lands. Wormsley is about an hour out of London and the performance is on the estate rather than in a town, so the interval and the grounds are part of the booking rather than an afterthought.