It's not like there hadn't been performances and recordings of the music of Zaide, Mozart's first Turkish singspiel, before. Although the work was left unfinished and unperformed in the composer's lifetime, its music has been accepted into the canon as a sort of trial run for The Abduction from the Seraglio from the following year. But performances of the complete Zaide music in context of its singspiel had always been considered essentially impossible since the spoken dialogue along with all traces of the plot were long since lost. Orchestral cellist turned early music conductor turned greatest living Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, having recorded nearly every other sung stage work of Mozart's over the years, turned in the composer's 250th anniversary year of 2006 to the unfinished Zaide. Outfitted with a new "topical" plot and dialogue, the work proves less a lighthearted entrainment and more a heavy-handed parody -- or perhaps it's just the conductor and the narrator. While the singers from soprano Diana Damrau through tenor Michael Schade to bass Anton Scharinger are more or less convincing in their roles, Harnoncourt seems to aim below Mozart's usual celestial level to the more mundane and Zaide's music seems more crude and even vulgar than Mozart's standard graceful and elegant style. Similarly, while Tobias Moretti's delivery is more or less straightforward with little of the dramatic enthusiasm that so often mars the performances of actors in singspiels, the story he spins is so unlike Mozart's music that it creates an insuperable gap between the words and the music, a gap that is as fatal to the success of this performance as Harnoncourt's direction. Deutsche Harmonia Mundi's sound is crisp, clean, and realistic, sometimes, as in the first moments after the overture, disconcertingly so.
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