For all the historical veracity in Milk, the movie's handling of the opera in Harvey's life is a (forgivable) mess. The tender scene in which Harvey calls Scott with his morning-after account of Sat., Nov. 25, 1978, two days before his assassination, deftly captures the palpitations of an opera queen laying claim to a particularly star-studded night at the opera. Yet it doesn't begin to capture the excitement of that night.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Bidu Sayao – in fact, Harvey's date that evening, when the pair was seated in then-General Director Kurt Herbert Adler's own Box A, always a place to watch in the War Memorial – had sung in the first Tosca Harvey heard, was a famous Tosca (she never sang the role), or even was singing Tosca that night. But the evening's buzz (I was there) was Magda Olivero, the woman who was.

The tiny segment of the audience who knew who she was at all was flaming out over the prospect of hearing a singer known to be the real thing, or perhaps the last real thing, as a singer of verismo, often rumored to have sung for Puccini himself. She was also rumored to be 72 or, depending on whom you believed, 73 at the time, though there are Chinese dynasties shorter than the range of years over which she claimed, or was said, to have been born. (Apparently, Olivero herself now sets the birth year as 1910, and, having sung a bit from Francesca da Rimini in public at 99, hopes for a bit on her 100th.)

I mention this because it was one of the great nights at the War Memorial, with Olivero the best Tosca I've heard live, and because it makes me feel like helium-heeled Harvey on the phone with you, morning after, just writing about it. Also because I was flabbergasted to read, in Renee Fleming's own note to her new CD, Verismo (Decca), that she met Olivero and got what's perhaps best thought of as "advice" from the golden-age diva. Although she quotes Olivero as telling her, I'm guessing pungently, "I never sang. I acted," and also claims to have immersed herself in the recordings of Olivero and other back-in-the-day practitioners of verismo, the one thing that's clear is that Fleming has, as ever, gone her own way with the material, for good and for ill.

What I remember most about Olivero's 1978 Tosca is the unerring dramatic line she cut through the part – as deftly as she dispatched Giorgio Tozzi's Scarpia with her tiny little dagger. The singing, expert and thrilling, was almost incidental. Fleming's work, by stark contrast, is all about the manicuring of every note and phrase, some of them in fact arresting on their own, elaborate terms.

I've yet to make it through her hyper-inflected "Senza mamma" from Suor Angelica without having to wash out my ears with Joan Sutherland's. Evidence notwithstanding, no one thinks of Sutherland as a verismo singer, yet the way she magically floats the aria on a single, sustained line, laying you out emotionally before taking you to the heaven of that sustained high pianissimo at the end, could not have displeased Puccini.

The latest Decca daffy diva research project (with another from Bartoli coming right up), Verismo does offer repertoire well worth sampling. Surely this is your last chance at Stephana's little weeper from Giordano's opera Siberia. While most people consider this some of the most listenable music of the last century, I find it among the most bizarre. Worth the prince of admission for me was the "world premiere recording" of the "original manuscript version" of "Sola, perduta, abbandonata" from Puccini's Manon Lescaut, irrefutable proof that Puccini knew an aria that needed revising once he wrote it. But it brought back memories of Olivero's arresting recording of the opera's complete fourth act with Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra years ago. Fleming may not have caught that one.

For a project of comparable weight but less baggage, look no farther than Veronique Gens' Tragediennes 2 (Virgin Classics) with gay early-music master Christophe Rousset and his superb Les Talens Lyriques. Like Fleming's CD, this second volume of French opera arias from the 18th and 19th centuries mixes familiar (Gluck's Alceste, Cheribini's Medee ) and unfamiliar (Gretry, de Arriaga, and three arias by Antonio Sacchini) items, bringing the program to brilliant finale with Cassandre's "Malheureux Roi" from Berlioz' Les Troyens, still a stretch for most historical performaniacs, but one these phenomenal, questing musicians revel in.

Gens creates whole characters in these cameo-sized excerpts, and she sings each selection with the kind of specificity that keeps her gallery of musical portraits consistently compelling. The instrumental contributions from Rousset and the band, particularly the gossamer "Ballet des ombres heureuses" from Gluck's Orphee et Eurydice, are revelatory.