Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria ("The return of Ulysses to his homeland") is a 166-minute studio album of Claudio Monteverdi's opera, performed by a cast of singers headed by Ann Murray, Patrick Power, Frederica von Stade and Richard Stilwell with the Glyndebourne Chorus and the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Raymond Leppard.

[1][5][6] The cover of the album shows von Stade and Stilwell on stage at Glyndebourne during the opera's concluding scene, in which Penelope acknowledges that the apparent stranger who has come to Ithaca claiming to be Ulysses is indeed her husband.

[7] The musicologist Denis Arnold reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in December 1980, comparing it with earlier versions of the opera conducted by Rudolf Ewerhart[8] and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Ewerhart's Maureen Lehane was much more au fait with Monteverdi's phrasing and accentuation than von Stade, and more successful too at expressing Penelope's "pathos and dignity".

Ewerhart's Gerald English had a much better grasp of Monteverdi's idiom than Leppard's Richard Stilwell, and presented a Ulisse who was convincing in sounding as though his return to his homeland had refreshed his weary soul.

He had addressed the lacunae in the opera's Vienna urtext with great skill, composing a missing ballet, for instance, that could easily be mistaken for one of Monteverdi's Scherzi Musicali.

His use of a large orchestra was justifiable in principle - the earliest extant score of the opera had been found in Vienna, and Viennese court productions if the early 1600s were believed to have deployed a wide assortment of instruments.

Longing for her husband to come back to her; blending flirtatiousness with "sinister charm" in her management of her loathsome suitors; glowing with hope that her ordeal might eventually end; stricken with fear that the man who seemed to be Ulysses might not be; rhapsodic in her recognition that her prayers had finally been answered: in every chapter of Penelope's narrative arc, she was totally convincing.

But even though Leppard's treatment of his source material was undeniably anachronistic, it was also "extremely effective", indeed "stunning" - what Monteverdi has left as a skeleton of a piece had been changed into an opera "full of drama and lyricism".

"The magnificent Ritorno d'Ulisse, he wrote, "... is subjected to Raymond Leppard's syrupy, swooning 'realization', which now sounds risible, but - however lavishly transposed and ornamented - it's inspiring to hear von Stade's bereft Penelope".