BY SIMON MUNDY | FIRST PUBLISHED 7 JUN 2026

Opening late Friday afternoon on 12 June and starring tenor Ed Lyon, Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (‘The Return of Ulysses to His Country’) is the Early Music offering this summer at Garsington Opera – no longer in Garsington itself, but on the Wormsley Estate (home of the Getty family) in the Chiltern Hills since 2011. The return, in Ulysses’s case, is said to be to the tiny island kingdom of Ithaca, to the west of the Greek mainland.

This production, as with L’Orfeo in 2022, is directed by John Caird, a veteran of theatre drama who came to opera late, but with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the original production of Les Misérables (with Trevor Nunn) underpinning his craft. Cecelia Hall plays the part of Ulysses’s wife, Penelope, while Ulysses himself will be sung by the tenor Ed Lyon. The impressive cast line-up also includes James Gilchrist (Eumete), Dafydd Jones (Telemaco), Fiona Kimm (Ericlea), Claire Lees (Minerva / Amore), Stuart Jackson (Iro) and Rowan Pierce (Melanto), among others. Laurence Cummings leads The English Concert from the harpsichord, on stage and in costume.

When I spoke to Ed, he and the cast were deep into rehearsals. John Caird has been directing with much the same methods as he honed at Manchester’s Contact Theatre in 1973. As Ed and I discussed, John ‘doesn't overprepare a scene in rehearsal. He has a really good feel for opera, and when we started, we had loads of conversations about which recordings worked for him in portraying the drama, which ones didn’t, and why. Many directors claim that their approach is text-led, but it often isn’t. With John, it really is. In Monteverdi’s time, it would have been the librettist, not the composer, who got top billing.’ In this case, the librettist was the Venetian nobleman Giacomo Badoaro.

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_{Director John Caird introduces Garsington’s production of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse, starring Ed Lyon}

Later in the year, Ed will rejoin Laurence Cummings and the Academy of Ancient Music at The Barbican on 17 November for Monteverdi’s final opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea (‘The Coronation of Poppea’). ‘All three operas are love stories, but they are all so different,’ he says. Il ritorno is about grown-ups, not first-flush lovers. It’s about stillness and finding a way through love in middle age. We have to realise, too, how precarious and dangerous Penelope’s position is.’

Another interesting feature of this production is the choice of pitch. ‘In Garsington, we’re singing at A465, which is unusual in modern performance practice. It feels so different in the voice, and so high! Minerva (sung by Claire Lees) sounds very sparkly! The wonderful thing about Garsington is that it is not really a normal theatre. The glass walls give it a permeable quality, merging indoors and outdoors. In 2019, in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw it was so helpful to have the light in the garden gradually turning dark, reflecting the growing darkness in the story.

‘I like to be able to see my audience, especially in this type of music. It makes the contact so direct! There’s an immediacy to it as a performer that you don’t get if there are huge lights blocking them out. I remember doing Cavalli’s L’Ormindo in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at The Globe, where you could improvise, turn to one person in the audience and whisper something. I also love having the instrumental musicians on stage, as they were for L’Ormindo, and are for the Monteverdi cycle at Garsington, as there is no formal conductor, no-one in front telling you what to do. No-one is leading, so everyone is. We're using the same set plan as for L’Orfeo and there’s no orchestra pit.

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_{Ed Lyon in the title role of Monteverdi's L’Orfeo singing Orfeo's central aria, ‘Possente spirto’ as he pleads his way to the underworld.}

‘Il ritorno is a tough piece. You have to allow vocal lyricism to come through, but not all the time. You have to be sensitive to where Monteverdi is making the transitions, like the way Shakespeare moves from blank verse to rhyme. It’s not easy, and you have to build the audience’s trust in the story and the relationships. We’re lucky at Garsington that the people who come tend to be well-prepared and not just there for a social occasion.’

‘Laurence Cummings has always been keen for me to sing Nerone (the emperor Nero), whose empress is being crowned,' Ed comments, ‘so in Poppea at The Barbican, I’ll sing it for the first time – a rarity for a tenor these days when it has become a countertenor calling card. I’ve just been listening to the part in the car, and I realise that I’ve sung almost all the other tenor parts in these three operas so much (L’Orfeo, Il ritorno d’Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea) that sometimes I slip into their lines and I can’t remember who I am!’

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_{Ed Lyon singing Alessandro’s aria, ‘Misero, così va’ from Eliogabalo, the last surviving opera by the Venetian composer Francesco Cavalli | Dutch National Opera & Ballet, 2017}

After Garsington, Ed will be concentrating much more on concert performances. ‘There’s Monteverdi’s eighth book of madrigals with Academy of Ancient Music [in Venice]. Then, I’m in Handel’s Messiah with the New York Philharmonic and in Cleveland with Apollo’s Fire. I'll have done four operas this past season, and that’s enough for a bit. They take you away from normal life for a long time.’

Normal life also involves his work as a therapist, for which he qualified during the 2020 Covid year. He has an integrative practice combining ‘cognitive behavioural hypnotherapy’, ‘compassion-focused therapy’ and ‘brain-spotting’, with a focus on anxiety conditions. While he works with people from all backgrounds, his focus is to help ‘people in the performing industries deal with the challenges they face, both in preparation for a career and in response to problems encountered.’ His deep understanding of human psychology will no doubt help in portraying this troubled character inside Garsington's beautiful glass-sided pavilion.

Ed Lyon will sing the title role in Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse at Garsington Festival Opera in eight performances between 12 June and 25 July. Visit Garsington’s Continuo Connect profile for more information.