Simply Wonderful

Mozart's 'Il re pastore' at Garsington,
reviewed by RODERIC DUNNETT

Leonard Ingrams' unexpected death robbed Garsington Opera of the most benign and intelligent of founding fathers, as well as someone with a fine knowledge of the repertoire and its possibilities.

However the Oxfordshire opera festival, with Glyndebourne's former head Anthony Whitworth-Jones cast as Ingrams' successor (not just Garsington's General and Artistic Director, but also its spiritual Curator), still bears its Founder's stamp; and hopefully will broadly retain the unique character Leonard and Rosalind Ingrams (now the Festival's President) devised for it.

Appropriately, Garsington has set up an already generously-endowed Foundation, bearing Leonard Ingrams' name, to ensure the continuation of this most tasteful of English summer opera events; and aptly for an award honouring such a well-informed devotee of Haydn, Mozart, Strauss and Rossini, one of its most immediate acts has been also to set up a vocal scholarship for an outstanding emerging singer.

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