One we can see, one we can’t – but the 40 years that separate these new releases speak volumes in terms of changing attitudes to Verdi’s Dame aux camélias. Orfeo has Vienna on a Christmas Day (!) at the start of the 1970s: the booklet champions the production for ‘avoiding the danger of filling the stage with ostentatious effects’ but the photographs suggest the habitual grand opera gala version, replete with cheated ‘period’ (ie late-19th-century) designer frocks and over-decorated Paris interiors. The music-making is a little like this too – under Krips wholly un-Italian, grand, noisy and not the last word in ensemble. Cornell MacNeil and Nicolai Gedda contribute star guest spots: the baritone is rather rough; the tenor sometimes abandons his great instinctive tastes in favour of a verismo overstatement.

But there is Ileana Cotrubaş, her local debut in a role that made her famous. The voice is ideal for Violetta, true but not creamy, pure without being white or colourless. Her emotional understanding of the role treads a fine line of pride, sadness, defiance, self-pity and understanding. With just that extra ‘live’ frisson that the DG studio recording (3/86^R) could not have, her performance alone makes this set a valid reissue – but (a problem with many Orfeo opera releases) one that I suspect many collectors will have purchased already in the decades it’s been available in hardly inferior sound. Oh, Orfeo are most keen, with extra photos and billing, that we know that the Flora is Edita Gruberová…By comparison, the Graz version feels like a return to authentic original instrument practices. Director Konwitschny remembers that Verdi wanted the show set in modern dress and that only the Zeffirellis of this world think that Flora’s party is a ballet. His production (most carefully designed by Johannes Leiacker) ditches built scenery in toto, plays on a forestage area marked out by the house curtains and drapes and concentrates on the often very cruel emotional journey of the three principal characters. Marlis Petersen (recently René Jacobs’s Pamina), James Rutherford (Bayreuth’s Hans Sachs) and Italian tenor Giuseppe Varano (as a nerdy, speccy Alfredo straight out of Brad in The Rocky Horror Show) are intensely involved and in good vocal shape. Tecwyn Evans conducts with great rhythmic acuity and finds pace and tension without rushing or becoming unduly loud. The opera plays without interval and the standard cuts are made. An outstanding issue and a quite draining experience.