Having primarily made her name in lyric Mozart and Strauss operas, Renée Fleming has been returning to the bel canto roles she sang earlier on, not always successfully (Rossini’s Armida) though besting her younger self in this new Lucrezia Borgia. Painted with less vocal display that some of the composer’s heroines, the title-character has long accommodated mature-period singers. On video, Fleming joins the ranks of Joan Sutherland and Edita Gruberová, all of them caught past the age of 50.

Fleming seems fired by the theatricality of a reviled female character who commands every dramatic situation she encounters. In particularly complex moments, she registers sexual tension towards young Gennaro, whom she knows to be her son although she doesn’t come out with it until Act 3. In comparison with an archival recording of her 1998 Lucrezia at La Scala, Fleming now favours faster, more cogent tempi, doesn’t strike out in as many vocal directions but centres everything more towards the middle of her voice, not because the high notes aren’t there (they are, but approached more carefully) but because her priority is an integrated characterisation. The main reservation is her calculation. Any distance between singer and role devalues the kind of visceral drama that most bel canto operas need to hold the stage.

The younger Fleming had this kind of abandon with thrillingly cool vocal accuracy. Now one feels that mainly in Act 3, when Lucrezia appears like an avenging angel (breastplate and all). Young Michael Fabiano, dashing as he is, comes off even more calculated – he doesn’t seem all that comfortable onstage yet, though he’s clearly on his way to a major career with a plangent Italianate tenor that readily conveys unreserved passion. Among other roles, Elizabeth DeShong is a powerful vocal and dramatic presence as Orsini, though Vitalij Kowaljow is less so as the villainous Alfonso.

The John Pascoe production is handsome, sumptuous and towering with ornate costumes. The modern-dress, pared-back Christof Loy production from the Bavarian State Opera (Medici/EuroArts) is a bit of a relief, though Gruberová’s Lucrezia tends towards unvaried loudness. Sutherland (now on Opus Arte) was shot in 1980 (a matronly time of life) at the Royal Opera, though with the bel canto idiom in her bones and co-star Alfredo Kraus in his considerable prime. Also, conductor Richard Bonynge telegraphs the music’s importance in nearly every bar – far more than the polished but less knowing support Fleming has from Riccardo Frizza.