Soloistic virtuosity (The Times) A truly great achievement (The Guardian) the excellent Garsington Opera Orchestra (The Sunday Times) fine playing from members of the Garsington Opera Orchestra, proving once again that outstanding operatic performances begin in the pit (Mail on Sunday) Garsington Opera Orchestra, in their last season, played with flair and expertise (The Observer) superb playing (Oxford Times) mesmerising playing (Culture Whisper) Großartig auch das nuancierte Spiel der dreizehn Instrumentalisten (Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung)

The Garsington Opera Orchestra, playing in its 26th and final season for the company, has been garnering praise from critics and audience alike. The orchestra, led by Robert Salter and managed by Chris West, has appeared in 85 productions and around 600 performances in their quarter century as the house orchestra at Garsington. They hope to continue working together for other companies in the future.

Musically, an opera such as this [Don Giovanni] presents something like an acid test of a house’s overall quality and all the signs are good. The Garsington Opera Orchestra was excellent.

Roger Parker, Opera magazine

But it is [Garsington Opera] orchestra — carefully tracing the music’s path from fairytale delicacy, through charming sentimentality, to grandeur — that make the strongest case for this long-neglected work [Fantasio].

Financial Times

Richard Farnes drew excellent playing from the 13 members of the Garsington Opera Orchestra, a scintillating account where every note of Britten’s most compactly composed opera [Turn of the Screw] was pricked with precision.

Mark Pullinger, Bachtrack

Farnes binds it into an unbroken totality, creating a superbly controlled long dramatic line, while at the same time extracting every detail of instrumental colour and making Britten’s thirteen instruments, superbly played, sound like every kind of orchestra, from a gamelan up to the LSO. There were thrilling sonorities in this performance that I’ve never heard in a Britten chamber score

Stephen Walsh, Artsdesk