I was in the audience the night John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in 1991, and I distinctly remember at least one lusty boo behind me. I turned to discover that it came from a prominent critic of the old school, which at that point in the history of American opera meant a writer who felt Corigliano’s musically accessible and dramatically lively score was a sell-out. Serious opera didn’t sound like this; serious opera was descended from the spirit of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, and latterly through the European ethos of composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Bernd Alois Zimmerman.

That view represented an ideological position more than an objective truth. American opera has always been stylistically variegated. When Corigliano’s comedy was premiered in the early ’90s, many celebrated it as a rebirth of American opera, perhaps because it was the first opera commissioned by the Met in a quarter of a century. Yet American opera composers hadn’t been silent during the dormition of the country’s operatic hegemon. Philip Glass had composed the seminal ‘Portrait Trilogy’ (Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha and Akhnaten) and Carlisle Floyd had written Of Mice and Men and Willie Stark, to cite only two composers with very different approaches to the form.

But The Ghosts of Versailles did play a role in changing the face of American opera, proving to impresarios that contemporary opera could be popular. So in a sense there is a connection between these two releases from Pentatone’s American Operas series, both billed as ‘world premiere recordings’ even though the original Metropolitan Opera production of the Corigliano has been available on VHS tape and more recently DVD. Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain, recorded live during its premiere run at the Santa Fe opera last summer, belongs to the new generation of American opera which is, in many places, now faring better with audiences than standard repertoire. It also shares several key traits with other works in this new age of abundant American opera, many of which were salient in Corigliano’s work: an emphasis on drama, a tendency to cinematic pacing, a flexible tonal palette incorporating a capacious stylistic versatility and a still awkward relationship to the voice and its natural habits.

Both of these works are by design more fun to watch than to listen to, especially Corigliano’s mix of spectacle, schtick and pastiche. William M Hoffman’s libretto – an opera within an opera mixing up historical characters from the French Revolution with familiar faces from Beaumarchais’s three comedies based on the Almaviva family – is a romp, and a rather silly one, and the music romps along with it, veering from sweet and sentimental to the standard set pieces of opera buffa, including patter songs, menacing monologues of evil, chirping lyrical effusions and a lot of music that falls somewhere between Mozart and Rossini. The LA Opera production, captured here in a performance from 2015, is well cast, with strong contributions from soprano Patricia Racette, who is a dramatically effective but not always dulcet-toned Marie Antoinette, Christopher Maltman as Beaumarchais, Lucas Meachem as Figaro and an effectively nasal and histrionic Patti LuPone in the small role of Samira.

But none of these admirable singers can quite compete with the star power that was assembled for the opera’s 1991 run, which included Teresa Stratas, Marilyn Horne and Renée Fleming, with James Levine leading the orchestra. James Conlon is firmly in command of the LA Opera forces but even a sure and steady hand will never tame this musical farrago into something substantial.

Higdon’s Cold Mountain is a sturdier, darker and more consistent work, based on the popular 1997 Civil War novel by Charles Frazier. The best-selling book has also been adapted as a film, and the Civil War has been a national obsession over the past five years of anniversary remembrance. So Higdon might have retailed a sentimental Americanism in the vein of Aaron Copland and pleased audiences through direct appeal to nostalgia and emotion. But the composer eschews almost all outside references and limits her own formidable command of folk idioms to a few scenes in which the fiddle plays an essential part in the drama. Instead, she writes music with a bracing, gun-metal grey flintiness, using her deft orchestration skills to evoke the novel’s mix of violence and reverie.

One senses an intellectual decision, and perhaps a brilliant one, that has led to complicated aesthetic results. Frazier’s novel – and to a large extent Gene Scheer’s libretto – depicts a world of emotional brokenness, of desolation and isolation. The characters learn and perhaps grow through the violence enacted on them; but musically, Higdon responds to violence not with a contrasting lyricism but with music of chamber-scale textures, often lone woodwinds etching rather desiccated lines as background to the truncated, lyrically circumscribed text-setting. Unlike other recent American operas, which hew to a more conventional sense that drama builds to lyrical release, Higdon’s drama builds to powerful moments of thinness, verging on silence.

Again, it must be far easier to process this music when it is heard in the opera house than on recording. Even with careful attention to the libretto, the short scenes and their often rapid devolution into brutal denouements make for a trajectory that is exhausting but without catharsis until the final scenes of the second act.

Baritone Nathan Gunn and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard are dramatically committed in the lead roles of Inman and Ada, though Gunn’s voice can be dry and Leonard’s upper range thins out especially in ensemble passages. The players of the Santa Fe Opera orchestra, under the direction of Miguel Harth-Bedoya, are often perilously exposed but rarely falter. Unfortunately, abundant stage noise becomes a significant distraction. This is Higdon’s first opera; and while it is polished and she has a flair for setting text clearly, it doesn’t always capture the lyrical, lush and tonally peripatetic style that has made her music some of the most attractive and popular being produced today. But it does leave a powerful sense of bleakness and, better than many efforts to capture the essence of the Civil War over the past few years, it does so without a trace of sentimental cant.