With no prospect of performance, Mozart abandoned his first harem Singspiel at the crucial juncture where Gomatz and Zaïde are pleading with the Sultan for their lives after a failed escape attempt. The original libretto on which Mozart’s friend Schachtner based his text of Zaïde (whose dialogue is missing) includes a final twist in which Gomatz and Zaïde turn out to be brother and sister rather than lovers, as implied earlier. We can only speculate whether Mozart would have retained this volte-face, though it is a safe bet that all would have ended happily, with a twelfth-hour change of heart from the Sultan and a final ensemble of rejoicing. Rather than finish anticlimactically with spoken dialogue, this new recording offers a sung finale in the shape of the splendid, little-known quartet, K479, written for an opera by Francesco Bianchi and here fitted out with a new text by Brian Michaels. While Mozart would surely have ended Zaïde with a vaudeville-style finale, just as in Die Entführung, Michaels’s enterprising solution works well dramatically, and in any case offers a rare chance to hear a vintage Mozart ensemble that foreshadows those in the Da Ponte operas.

If only the performance were more strongly cast. Martin Haselböck, while not the most poetic of conductors, has a sharp ear for felicitous woodwind detail, and encourages playing of crackling energy in numbers like the Sultan’s melodrama and Zaïde’s magnificently defiant “Tiger” aria. Spanish soprano Isabel Monar sings this with plenty of fire, though pleasure in her lyrical music, including the ravishing lullaby “Ruhe sanft”, is marred by the bright glare on her tone and a lack of grace in the phrasing. Markus Schäfer’s Gomatz, too, is better in vehement than lyrical mode (his soft singing tends to rawness), while Markus Brutscher’s thinvoiced, hammy Sultan sounds like a displaced Monostatos. All the soloists, including the feeble Allazim (who also sings Osmin’s comic drinking song, here relegated to an appendix), are eclipsed by their counterparts on the two rival recordings: the theatrically intense Harnoncourt, which dubiously replaces dialogue with a “topical” narrative, and the warmer-toned Goodwin performance, with Lynne Dawson profoundly touching in the title-role.