Aulis Sallinen’s Kuningas Lear – from a translation of the play by Matti Rossi – was filmed in 2002 at a revival of its Finnish premiere production. Given some time-travel updating of its audience’s harmonic appreciation, this team’s approach to the play could have sat well at the Paris Opéra of the 1850s. Shakespeare’s narrative is followed more literally and patiently than by Reimann and adaptor/librettist Claus H Henneberg in their Lear. In a work lasting less than three hours, Sallinen and Rossi use over half an hour just getting to the end of Lear’s division-of-the-kingdom opening. Shakespeare is even augmented as their Fool – a singing role unlike chez their German rivals – gets a Prologue of his own.

In contrast, Reimann and Henneberg can’t wait to get going with the psychological crises. Their Lear’s score is based on quick-moving accompanied recitative with underlaying or interposed instrumental mood and atmospheric descriptions. Brass and wind have that 20th-century prominence as if they’ve swapped roles with the strings, while there’s a distinctive, large and colourful percussion group. Sallinen/Rossi, however, give themselves time to lay out character types in music (the ‘bad’ daughters are like rival prima donnas from some Mozart Singspiel) from which arias could be extracted and melodies (try the Act 2 reunion of Lear and Cordelia, and its final scene reprise) quite readily remembered. The impression, from a more Romantic strings-and-wind-based instrumental group, is altogether more lyrical, although Sallinen the colourist symphony composer can produce upsetting sonorities where necessary: try the spooky, mostly quiet ‘Forest’ in Act 2 where we first see Lear’s madness with Edgar as Poor Tom – the scene that Verdi said he was scared of composing.

The energy and pace of the Reimann bear witness to its creators’ engagement with their subject. Their version feels less a setting of another’s masterpiece than a subject they’re realising themselves. That’s emphasised in this Hamburg performance. Simone Young (and Skovhus, her virtuoso interpreter of the title-role) sculpts a more extreme, more Wozzeck-like reading of the score than Gerd Albrecht did originally (and on DG’s premiere recording – 9/79, 9/00) with a more sorrowfully lyrical Fischer-Dieskau. Young is also especially attentive to dynamics and dramatic structure. Karoline Gruber’s stage production uses well-tried Brechtian devices – for example, partners in duet not talking directly to each other, very effective in the Lear-Cordelia reunion, where Erwin Leder’s sad-faced Fool embodies Cordelia (as perhaps in stagings Shakespeare saw). This taps the mood of the play more harrowingly than the pretty Pre-Raphaelitism and naturalistic acting of Ponnelle’s premiere staging (excerpts on YouTube).

The Sallinen’s Finnish cast is impressive, albeit in a more conventional production context (Kari Heiskanen, with some influence from the too little-known Peter Brook film). I don’t know the order in which the work was composed, but Sallinen’s timing of the action seems to click into a higher gear from the end of Act 1 scene 2 where bastard Edmund ‘deposes’ Edgar from the Gloucester family inheritance. There is some classy singing from Salminen in the title-role (less physically involved than Skovhus, although his stage presence and final death fall are remarkable), Silvasti’s disturbed, neurotic Edmund, Jorma Hynninen’s less-is-more Gloucester and Lilli Paasikivi’s heart-and-soul Cordelia.

Having waited for all of the 19th century (Berlioz, then Verdi?) and much of the 20th (Britten?) for a setting of Shakespeare’s King Lear from a major operatic composer, the gods, London bus-like, suddenly delivered two in 1978 and 2000. They are both remarkable and remarkably different, and hugely recommended.