The theme of this year's Lufthansa Baroque Festival is exoticism, and how the styles of Africa, the Americas and the Orient impacted upon the 18th-century Western European tradition. Even the great figures of the period were not immune: if the Turkish element of Mozart's Singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail is the best known example of his response to these external influences, last night's concert performance of the unfinished Zaide, composed around 1780, offered another, earlier perspective.
In some ways it is a dry run for Entführung, written two years later - the story is a similar tale of romance and derring-do among the slaves of a middle eastern potentate - but musically it is distinct, not only in its use of melodrama rather than dialogue, but also in the pre-echos of Mozart's later Italian operas. Mozart left a number of operatic torsos. But what has given Zaide more life than works such as L'Oca del Cairo and Lo Sposo Deluso is partly the sheer quantity of the surviving music, and the fact it includes one of Mozart's most sublime arias, Ruhe Sanft, whose quality of soaring expressiveness is unlike anything else in his output. There are been numerous attempts to make Zaide into a dramatic and musical whole; other pieces of Mozart have been coralled into the score, more detailed scenarios (including one by Italo Calvino) imposed upon the rudimentary dramatic structure. But this performance, conducted by Ivor Bolton with the Freibourg Baroque Orchestra, played just what survives in Mozart's manuscript. In fact, it's an uneven score, and nothing else in it comes within light years of its most famous number, though the singing here did not do it many favours. The soprano in the title role, Veronica Cangami, was a late replacement - her intonation never quite got on terms with the baroque pitch being used by the orchestra, which had previously shown its muscle in Mozart's Symphony No 34. But then none of the cast seemed totally secure: only Rufus Muller, as the Sultan Soliman, exuded authority; and Zaide itself was never elevated above curiosity status. · Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music continues until June 28 (Box Office: 020 7222 1051)