Seductive enchantress Alcina can conjure anything she wants – anything, except love.

Alcina rules over an enchanted island, its trees, rocks and animals all the bewitched forms of her discarded lovers. But Ruggiero is different. Alcina has fallen in love with the handsome knight. Can love perform the ultimate enchantment and transform Alcina herself? Or, faced with her lover’s desertion, will she once again choose vengeance and violence?

A son searching for his father; a woman searching for her fiancé; a sorceress searching for truth: Handel’s last and greatest ‘magic’ opera is an exuberant fantasy full of illusion and wizardry, but it’s also a probing psychological portrait of love in all its forms. In Alcina herself Handel creates one of the most complex and compelling heroines of his career – at once witch and woman, villain and victim.

Director Francesco Micheli brings style and sumptuous excess to Glyndebourne’s first ever staging, conducted by Jonathan Cohen.

Recorded live at Glyndebourne Opera House, Festival 2022. ​This production has been captured in 4K.

The edition of Alcina used in these performances is published by Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel, edited by Siegfried Flesch. Performed by arrangement with Faber Music Ltd, London