Alcina - full opera
Rent the highlights of Festival 2022 • 2h 57m
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
Up Next in Rent the highlights of Festival 2022
-
La bohème - full opera
Sometimes love just isn’t enough.
When seamstress Mimì meets the struggling writer Rodolfo they are instantly drawn together. But while Paris is a magical city of love, it’s also a very real place of hardship as the two young Bohemians and their friends soon discover, when not just jealousy but ...
-
Les Mamelles de Tirésias - full opera
Les Mamelles de Tirésias is a giddy romp of an opera that throws questions of politics, gender and society up into the air and watches them shatter into hundreds of glittering pieces. Frustrated with her life as a housewife, Thérèse transforms herself into a man and heads out into the world, leav...
-
The Wreckers: explore with Alexandra
Directed by Melly Still, this new production is the first major, professional staging of our lifetime, and the first opportunity to hear the opera as Smyth intended, with its original French libretto.
Opera specialist Alexandra Coghlan talks to director Melly Still and mezzo-soprano Karis Tucker...
