Two Toscas, two very different shows – and two valuable records of projects giving Puccini a spring clean. In Milan, La Scala music director Riccardo Chailly began his tenure promising a fresh focus on core Italian repertoire. In Puccini, that has meant championing original versions of the scores, notably the 1904 Madama Butterfly (3/19) and, recorded here, a new Ricordi edition of Tosca opening up cuts Puccini made after the 1900 premiere. In Amsterdam, Dutch National Opera’s young chief conductor Lorenzo Viotti has teamed up with iconoclastic director Barrie Kosky for a mini Puccini cycle. An acclaimed Turandot followed this 2022 Tosca, and Il trittico is still to come.

Poles apart as the stagings are – it’s tempting to call Kosky’s stark Dutch staging the Protestant riposte to the Catholic excess shown by director Davide Livermore in Milan – both are connected through allusions to cinema. Kosky cites film noir as an inspiration: not in the contemporary look of his production, minimally designed by Rufus Didwiszus, but in the bleakness of his approach and the tautness of his dramaturgy. Livermore’s hyperactive staging tries to ape the fluidity of a movie camera. The stage revolves, rises and falls as backdrops and settings glide on and off (monumental period designs by Giò Forma). A giant digitised portrait of Cavaradossi’s model, the Marchesa Attavanti, forms out of pixels, then goes from monochrome to colour when Cavaradossi activates it with a touch of his hand.

Both directors are drawing on Puccini’s proto-Hollywood instincts but Livermore does it with such self-conscious excess that it becomes a barrier. Bafflingly, the La Scala DVD also includes extended audience applause at the start of the 2019 prima performance for the great and the good in the royal box, a rendition of Italy’s national anthem and the curtain calls after Acts 1 and 2. Perhaps this is subtle commentary that Tosca is living in her own opera, but I doubt it.

Supporting and boosting Livermore’s overall approach, however, is Chailly, who paints the score in oils worthy of a Renaissance master. The flavours are rich and heavy, the tempos languorous (not always helpful for the singers), and the drama less frenetic than inexorable. There is nothing in the 1900 Urtext to scare the horses – the only addition that really startles is a slightly extended ending after Tosca realises her lover has been killed, making for less of a wham-bam finale than the usual brutal coda. The other alterations are curios for the completist to savour.

Kosky and Viotto, as closely allied in style, find fresh, sometimes truly shocking energy. Viotto favours lithe tempos and more transparent textures, the excellent Dutch strings sweet and bubbly in the first act’s comings and goings, then almost raw and guttural during Cavaradossi’s ordeal in Act 2. Kosky banishes almost all the usual rites of a Tosca staging – red velvet gowns, candles and castle battlements – but this must be one of the bloodiest Toscas shown on stage, in a world where the characters’ Christian faith is clearly a personal defence against the horror of the tyranny under which they live.

In Kosky’s production, Joshua Guerrero’s grungy, workaday painter Cavaradossi first appears spattered in paint – grimly echoed when in the cellar of Scarpia’s anonymous kitchen (this ‘baron’ is a dab hand at slicing his own sashimi) he suffers horrific torture and the red stuff flows liberally. The murder of Gevorg Hakobyan’s thuggish Scarpia is just as Tarantinoesque – it contrasts, again in Kosky’s favour, with the perfunctory knifing in Milan, which veers to the risible as a filmed close-up. Still, Luca Salsi’s smoother, seductively voiced Scarpia in Milan is, by a whisker, preferable to Hakobyan’s more forthright performance.

And the leading ladies? In Milan, Anna Netrebko is in imperious voice as Tosca, with her darkly tannic lower register especially forceful, and a ‘Vissi d’arte’ delivered with lashings of buttery tone. Her heroine, however, is cast in the usual, rather hackneyed mould of a proud if insecure diva, and her relationship with Francesco Meli’s Cavaradossi (heroic in tone, making the most of his big moments) is sketchily portrayed. The relationship Kosky charts between Guerrero’s subtler sung painter and Malin Byström’s compelling Tosca is brilliantly detailed, to a large part thanks to the sincerity of Byström’s approach, essentially playing the kind of talented, charismatic soprano regularly profiled in the pages of this magazine. The realism of the approach allows us to get sucked into the horror, and as the screw is turned Byström responds to every fresh disaster with haunting plausibility. Skilfully filmed (no curtain calls breaking in here) and exuding the confidence of a true ensemble show, the Dutch Tosca makes the punchier package.