Is La forza del destino Verdi’s best shot at Il re Lear? A grand-opera update of late Donizetti and Bellini historical epics? Or the composer’s most modern work to date (this Vienna performance gives the standard 1869 revision) in its running-together of tragedy, rough quasi-Brechtian comedy and ‘time-out’ ensemble spectacle – with the modernist postscript that the opera was surely designed to feel like one long interrupted duet for Carlo and Alvaro?

The production team here – David Pountney, Richard Hudson and their fiery choreographer Beate Vollack – prove that these three sides of the opera, undisguised and played all out, create the work’s dramatic unity. Hudson’s revolving set – scaffolding towers for the Act 3 battle scenes and a long-tongue rostrum with a single wall entry for the Calatravas, the tavern and Leonora’s hermit cave – consign lengthy scene changes to the dustbin. Costumes range from the 1860s to today for Vollack’s Wild West cabaret girls, fearlessly led and voiced by Nadia Krasteva’s Preziosilla. Zubin Mehta’s well-marshalled, unindulgent, unselfconscious conducting is ideal for both this work and production.

Pountney’s unfussily direct handling of the tragic side of the drama plays to his cast’s strengths. Compared to his colleagues here, the late Salvatore Licitra may not have been the stage’s most natural actor but, at full rip in the final confrontation with Álvarez’s Carlo or in the more internal Act 3 arias, a terrific passion carries all before it. Álvarez (and Pountney) make the fatal hesitation which always prevents Carlo doing anything ‘good’ (or charitable) especially clear and scary. Alistair Miles’s double of the two father figures strengthens the impression that Calatrava and Padre Guardiano are Verdi’s Lear and Kent in waiting. Bracci’s Melitone has evidently (been) worked hard to spare an excess of buffo clowning. And Nina Stemme’s Leonora? A hugely well-acted assumption of the role, with (in the ‘Pace! Pace, mio dio’ scena) the uncanny presence and vocal fury previously offered by Price, Barstow or Freni. Sound and vision are both helpful and this is the best realised of the four current Forza DVDs.