A Pair of Pop Queens Flaunt Winning Hands

The circumstances behind the two engagements were as different as the artists onstage, and yet a pair of DVDs due out on Columbia on Tuesday — “Live at the Royal Albert Hall” and “Live at Roseland: Elements of 4” — share some intriguing affinities. Naturally there’s the valorization of powerful, agile singing; there are explicit expressions of gratitude, amid an implicit air of conquest. Pointedly, too, there’s the suggestion of performance as testimony, the set list as personal narrative. In both cases the theme of female self-empowerment plays out, sometimes a bit awkwardly, against the fact of an unnamed but specific male partner.

And in each case, for different reasons, it’s the last such show we’re likely to see for a while. Beyoncé is expecting her first child, and presumably staged the Roseland takeover as a stopgap substitute for her usual global campaign. (A single-disc version of “Live at Roseland” has already been released exclusively to Wal-Mart; what’s out on Tuesday is the two-disc deluxe edition.) Adele, who canceled a recent North American tour because of problems with her vocal cords, had surgery several weeks ago and will return to singing only after a full recovery.

That both hiatuses revolve around bodily concerns is somehow fitting, given that both singers exert such an emphatic physicality, in the pliable grain of their voices and in the force of their presence onstage. Adele, whose fluency with brokenhearted catharsis recently formed the basis for a sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” is by far the less dynamic figure: throughout “Live at the Royal Albert Hall,” she’s rooted in place, often seated, with a mug of hot water and honey. By contrast, “Live at Roseland” makes an airtight spectacle out of movement, befitting Beyoncé’s role as the pop diva likeliest to use the word “body” as an action verb.

And yet Beyoncé shares Adele’s inclination — a diva’s right —to perceive the body more as a vessel than an object. (In this they both diverge from Lady Gaga, who was visible in a balcony on the night that I attended the Roseland run, and who has her own DVD out now, on Interscope: “The Monster Ball Tour: At Madison Square Garden,” a concert film first broadcast on HBO in May).

And while the term “singer-songwriter” is a shawl wrapped more readily around Adele’s shoulders, it also applies to Beyoncé, who receives a credit for all but one of the songs on “4.” On both new DVDs there are moments when the artist utters some variation on “And so I sat down and wrote this song.”

Beyoncé and Adele are on the record as a mutual admiration society, though they’re hardly coequals. Beyoncé, 30, is a multiplatform megastar, one of pop’s most incandescent performers. Adele, 23, released her first album in 2008, but broke through with “21,” far and away this year’s best-selling album, with more than four million copies sold.

Beyoncé, accustomed to blockbuster sales herself, is surely aware of the less robust performance of “4.” (It has sold 907,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which would be great news for almost anybody else in her field.) “Live at Roseland” waves away any possible insecurities with a performance framed convincingly as a victory lap, and (less convincingly) as some kind of culmination. Act 1 briskly traces a career history, going back to Beyoncé’s childhood, with hit medleys, crisp choreography and a scripted narration. Much of this — including the digs at her father and former manager, and the facile synopsis of her time in Destiny’s Child — is recycled from a previous DVD, “I Am ... Yours: An Intimate Performance at Wynn Las Vegas,” released on Sony in 2009.

Where things get more interesting is in the treatment of her relationship with her husband, the rapper Jay-Z, which is among the most public and least knowable partnerships in popular culture. At the concert Beyoncé’s only references to him were playfully indirect; on the DVD these moments come interspersed with unilluminating footage of the two together, a peek behind the curtain that only reveals a blank wall.

Which of course shrewdly places a runic significance on the songs. Act 1 of “Live at Roseland” concludes with “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” the biggest single from Beyoncé’s last album, an exhortation inspired by her own newly established marital status. The song just preceding it, her sublime kiss-off “Irreplaceable,” fits the chronology but is outsourced entirely to a willing audience, as if it no longer felt true enough to sing herself.