Monteverdi’s penultimate opera, The Return of Ulysses, has occupied a place on the fringes of the repertoire here since Glyndebourne staged it in a widely admired production by the late Peter Hall in 1972. Almost all of our regional companies, but not the Royal Opera, have followed Glyndebourne’s lead, while abandoning Raymond Leppard’s lush reorchestration, which did so much to re-establish this then neglected work — a poor sibling to the widely performed Coronation of Poppea — as a canonic piece.
Last year’s Monteverdi anniversary, the 450th of his birth, gave us the chance to reassess the work’s place in the composer’s surviving operatic oeuvre, when John Eliot Gardiner conducted and co-directed semi-stagings of the extant triptych: Orfeo, Ulysses and Poppea. Now the RO