The centrepiece of this year’s Brighton early music festival, Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola d’Alcina is the earliest surviving opera by a woman composer. Premiered in 1625 at the court of the Florentine regent, Maria Maddalena of Austria, it also broke new ground by jettisoning classical subject matter in favour of a narrative drawn from a Renaissance epic, in this instance from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

Two sorceresses, sensual Alcina and moralistic Melissa, battle for the soul and body of the warrior Ruggiero. Melissa is reckoned to be a thinly disguised portrait of the formidable Maria Maddalena herself.

Caccini, however, proves too subtle a psychologist to propagandise.

Alcina’s chromatic recitatives suggest an erotic allure that her rival never quite succeeds in countering, though the most remarkable music is reserved for the chorus of Alcina’s discarded lovers, transformed by magic into the exotic plants in the garden where she holds Ruggiero captive.

Staged by Susannah Waters, and directed from the keyboard by Deborah Roberts, the BREMF production is a delight. Waters’s Wildean take relocates the opera to Brighton itself at the close of the 19th century, where we find Nick Pritchard’s handsome, dissolute Ruggiero in thrall to Anna Devin’s charismatic Alcina, who presides over a coterie of corseted sirens and cross-dressing sailors that might have attracted Dorian Gray.

Countertenor Denis Lakey, meanwhile, in drag as Melissa, fusses and pontificates like Lady Bracknell. Placards held up by cast and chorus in place of surtitles give us a paraphrase of the text that is witty but sometimes obscures Caccini’s seriousness of purpose. But Pritchard and Devin look and sound gorgeous, Lakey can be very funny, and the choral singing is exceptionally beautiful. Roberts, who has also prepared the performing edition of the score, directs it with fastidious care.