Joseph Haydn: L’incontro improvviso – L’Orfeo Barockorcheste & Michi Gaigg

Joseph Haydn’s opera L’incontro improvviso, which belongs to the genre of Turkish opera, was successfully performed at the Donaufestwochen 2019 in Grein in the castle courtyard with the L’Orfeo Baroque Orchestra conducted by Michi Gaigg and is now finally available on CD. Mostly, the ‘Turkish opera’ is about the liberation of previously kidnapped women from the seraglio, the palace of a sultan or other ruler. Mozart’s singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail has become most famous. Haydn’s opera is set in Ottoman-ruled Egyptian Cairo and has gone down in the annals of music history as another “abduction” and, moreover, it keeps pace with the most outstanding sound creations of its time, sometimes even outstripping them by several lengths. A special feature of the score, which distinguishes it from those of Mozart’s Abduction or the incidental music to Voltaire’s Zaïre by the “Salzburg Haydn” Johann Michael, is the noticeably less militarily connoted use of the so-called ‘Turkish music’. Thus the latter – due to a special type of instrumentation – sometimes bears clear traits of Ottoman festive or dance music, as it was used, among other things, in the ceremonies of Middle Eastern dervish orders.