It has taken a while for this Rigoletto to appear on DVD. It was filmed in Barcelona in 2017, during the opening run of a staging by the Dutch director Monique Wagemakers that was previously seen in Amsterdam in 2004 and Madrid in 2009: a later performance from the Liceu was also streamed by OperaVision last year. Time has dated it a bit – Robert Wilson’s then fashionable influence lurks occasionally behind Wagemakers’s stylised approach – though the best of it is unquestionably engrossing.

It’s strikingly sparse. The set is dominated by a strip-lit hydraulic platform that looks like an overlarge gaming table when flat but tilts and swivels to reveal staircases leading up to Gilda’s room or down to Sparafucile’s lair. The costumes are 16th-century Mannerist, with Javier Camarena’s Duke in brocade and the chorus robed in either different shades of red or stark Frans Hals black. Chiaroscuro lighting adds to the sombre atmosphere, resulting in some striking effects such as Sparafucile’s first appearance, looming pallid and Nosferatu-like out of darkness.

There are eccentricities. Carlos Álvarez’s Rigoletto is no hunchback and the sole sign of disability is a slight limp. Countess Ceprano, meanwhile, is the only woman present at the opening party, though the sight of the whole chorus leering at her while Camarena’s Duke effectively forces himself on her strikes a deeply unsettling note. Elsewhere, Wagemakers can be extremely subtle. Álvarez’s affection for Désirée Rancatore’s Gilda has an obsessive quality that she clearly finds stifling. Monterone’s designation of Rigoletto as the Duke’s dog is literally borne out by his antics, crawling round on all fours and lifting one leg as if to urinate. And in Act 2, the gaming table takes on hideous significance as Rigoletto’s baiting turns literally into a spectator sport before the chorus are banished to an upstairs gallery to spend the rest of the opera looking down impassively on the final discomfiture of the man they loathe.

There’s some formidable singing, though Rancatore is not at her best here, her tone cloudy, her coloratura not as precise as it might be: a high E flat, ill-advisedly interpolated at the end of Act 2, throbs uncomfortably. Camarena and Álvarez, however, are both magnificent. Wagemakers imagines the Duke as an attractive but manipulative sensualist and Camarena really rises to the challenge, capturing both the man’s surface charm and the icy calculation beneath. His singing is effortless, with a breathtaking top D at the end of ‘Possente amor’, and the way his tone self-consciously sweetens in moments of seduction tells us precisely why the women drawn into his orbit are unable to leave. Álvarez’s comparably fine Rigoletto is dark-voiced, bitter in fear and self-loathing, and fiercely, commandingly lyrical in his scenes with Rancatore. ‘Cortigiani’, though sung with incredible accuracy and a fine sense of line, nevertheless sounds like the anguished howl of a wounded animal. It’s a compelling performance.

Ante Jerkunica, meanwhile, is a terrific, very malign Sparafucile, Ketevan Kemoklidze the glamorous, sympathetic Maddalena. There’s some superb choral singing, while Riccardo Frizza presses the score urgently forwards. His conducting can be edge-of-your-seat stuff – the Act 3 storm is electrifying, a real Shakespearean convulsion in nature – but there’s enough attention to detail elsewhere for Verdi’s lyricism and humanity to shine through. You have to make allowances for Rancatore, I’m afraid, but otherwise this is more than well worth watching.