This is purgatory. At least that’s where Louis Andriessen’s 2008 ‘film opera’ La Commedia is set. Andriessen and his collaborator, the film-maker Hal Hartley, have frisked The Divine Comedy to devise a scenario that sidesteps the narrative flow of the original, putting in its place five free-standing scenes which give us the essence of Dante’s vision. La Commedia is a reading of The Divine Comedy, not a setting in any conventional operatic sense.

Two stories intertwine. In one, Dante’s characters are teleported to modern-day Amsterdam, while the other strand revolves around a mean-and-moody troupe of travelling musicians who look like they might just play jazz from hell. They busk on the street and are collared by the police after a pinched bottom causes a bar brawl. Dante – ‘he’ is played by the decidedly female Cristina Zavalloni – turns up in the guise of a television news journalist who is reporting on the visit of Beatrice (a VIP, played by Claron McFadden) to Amsterdam, and Lucifer (Jeroen Willems) is portrayed as a spivvy and vain businessman: designer stubble, permanent grimace, power suits – the devil wearing Prada.

Wisely, Nonesuch has presented the opera on two CDs and on DVD. If you take my advice, you’ll watch before you listen. Is La Commedia richly layered or merely cluttered? You could construct a convincing argument either way but the visuals – Hal Hartley’s naturalistic, busy, black-and-white pre-filmed sections counterpointing against the brutalist scaffolding and stylised neon colours of the live stage action – certainly help with orientation.

There are other composers – his many imitators – who these days sound more like Louis Andriessen than Louis Andriessen, and it is encouraging to hear Andriessen himself shifting his language decisively away from everybody else’s pigeonholed view of his music. The basics remain: Stravinskian brass chorales underpinned by bass-lines that are pure Jaco Pastorius, pile-driving rhythms rooted in minimalism, fruity splashes of contrabass clarinet. But Andriessen, forever a compositional magpie, also embraces pop, Dutch folk music, big-band jazz, Hollywood schmaltz and pockets of abstract texture with a newly acquired freedom. Rough edges and stylistic disjoints rule; he’s not bothered how seamlessly it all hangs together. Reinbert de Leeuw directs the combined ASKO and Schönberg ensembles with clinical, steadfast accuracy – getting music of this complexity right must be hell.