This is the second DVD of Rusalka in three years to feature Asmik Grigorian in the title-role, and in many ways the two could not be further apart in aim and tone. The first, from Madrid in 2020, conducted by Ivor Bolton and directed by Christof Loy, strikingly reimagines Dvořák’s water spirit, yearning for human love, as an injured ballerina, longing to dance again and eventually paying a catastrophic emotional price for her rediscovered artistry. Ann Yee and Natalie Abrahami’s Covent Garden version, filmed last year, adheres more closely to fairy-tale convention, albeit with a slant, as the opera is also reinvented as a fable of man’s indifference to nature and its consequent despoilment.

The staging was in part conceived sustainably, and the green drapes that form Dvořák’s penumbral forest in the outer acts, the props and costumes are recycled from previous productions. An aerial ballet during the overture shows the Prince swimming in and out of Rusalka’s arms, before the Wood Spirits, dressed in mossy green, taunt the Water Goblin in the opening scene. When we reach the world of humanity, however, we become aware of nature’s violation in the grotesque metal artefacts and gilded wooden objects that fill the Prince’s cramped palace, where his wedding guests chain smoke and fetishistically smear themselves with oil. In Act 3, the waters of the now polluted lake are the dirty red colour of lead oxide, and the Wood Spirits have become entangled in detritus from the Prince’s party.

There’s some curious and unnecessary faffing with nomenclature. The Foreign Princess has become a Duchess, for some reason, and JeŽibaba is now ‘a wise, eternal spirit who lives between the water and the land’ rather than a witch, which sits uneasily both with the grotesquerie of the score and the understated malice of Sarah Connolly’s performance. In a moment that genuinely disturbs, she effects Rusalka’s transformation from spirit to human by hacking a tentacled creature, like something from Alien, out of her back, leaving her bloodied, and with a horrific scar. Yee and Abrahami lack Loy’s subtlety of psychological insight, though, and some of the great confrontations – the Prince’s first encounter with Rusalka, his second scene with the Duchess, the closing duet – seem ill-focused and under-directed.

Musically, however, much here is wonderful. Grigorian’s dramatic commitment is never in doubt, though her voice has darkened fractionally since the Madrid performance, where the vulnerability of the opening scenes is more delicately traced and the lines of the Song to the Moon are smoother. At Covent Garden, however, she’s tremendous in the later acts, unleashing a flood of sound and emotion that takes your breath away, particularly in the despair of her scene with the Water Goblin in Act 2, and the final duet with David Butt Philip’s Prince. Once past a couple of moments of constriction at the top, he is equally superb, warmer in tone than Bolton’s Eric Cutler, passionate in his delivery throughout.

Aleksei Isaev, meanwhile, makes a fine Water Goblin, his sorrowing second act aria most beautifully done. JeŽibaba lies fractionally high for Connolly, though there’s no doubting the vehement intensity of her characterisation. Emma Bell is all manipulative hauteur as the Duchess, and there’s a lovely trio of Wood Spirits, led by Vuvu Mpofu sounding particularly exquisite. Semyon Bychkov conducts it wonderfully well, too, his spacious speeds allowing both emotion and detail to register fully. There are moments of yearning here as intense as anything in Wagner, and a turbulent eroticism underscores the disastrous encounters between Prince and Duchess. I prefer the deeper richness of the Royal Opera Orchestra to Bolton’s more transparent Madrid forces, too. It all makes for essential listening, whatever qualms you may have about the staging.