Leoncavallo: Zingari – Rizzi

Some operas die of neglect. Others get murdered by well-meaning collaborators, and it takes a century of forensic musicology to sort out what the composer actually wrote from what got grafted on afterward to please a maestro, a tenor, or a box office. Zingari belongs to the second category, and Opera Rara have done the excavation work nobody asked for but everybody in the Leoncavallo trade secretly wanted.

The backstory is almost more interesting than the piece itself. London’s Hippodrome, having tired of elephants and water spectacles, went legit-ish around 1911 and wanted Leoncavallo back to repeat his Pagliacci miracle. He obliged with a Gypsy melodrama full of knives, betrayal, and a wedding that goes catastrophically wrong. The premiere did well. Then, as so often happened with Leoncavallo, other hands got at the score after his death, “improving” it for later productions, and the original 1912 conception went missing for decades. What we get here is a reconstruction of what the composer actually intended before the tinkering began.

Is it a lost masterpiece? No. Let’s not pretend.

The anvil-chorus opening is the sort of thing that makes you wince a little — Gypsy local color by numbers, tambourines doing the ethnographic heavy lifting Leoncavallo’s imagination couldn’t quite manage on its own. But stay with it. The chorus pivots into a sunset passage of real tenderness, harmonies opening out like a slow exhale, and suddenly you remember why this composer mattered even after Pagliacci became his epitaph. He had a gift for atmosphere, for the middle-distance orchestral wash that tells you exactly what time of day it is and what’s about to go wrong. The wedding scene later in the piece is the standout: glowing, unhurried, harmonically rich in a way that owes something to Puccini’s example without simply imitating it. Leoncavallo could paint a room. Populating it with memorable tunes was, on this occasion, a more intermittent talent.

Krassimira Stoyanova sings Fleana with the sort of vocal security that makes you trust every phrase even when the material underneath is thin. Her tone has darkened slightly with the years, which gives the character a weight the libretto doesn’t fully earn on its own. Arsen Soghomonyan, as Radu, produces some genuinely thrilling squillo in the upper register, if not always the last ounce of dramatic nuance; he sounds, at moments, like a singer more comfortable in bigger, blunter verismo statements than in this opera’s oddly compressed, almost cinematic scene-changes. Stephen Gaertner’s Tamar has the requisite menace. Łukasz Goliński, as the Old Man, brings a grizzled, grounded authority — the one performance that never overplays its hand.

Carlo Rizzi conducts with evident conviction and no apology. He doesn’t try to inflate the score into something it isn’t. The Royal Philharmonic play the sunset music and the wedding sequence with real sensitivity to color, muted strings, carefully weighted horn entries, and when the piece turns melodramatic they don’t oversell it either.

Where does this leave Zingari in the catalog? Alone. There’s no rival recording to weigh it against, which makes this issue valuable by default as much as by merit. Opera Rara’s house style is scholarly generosity: give the piece its due, document the textual history, let listeners draw their own conclusions. Leoncavallo remained, to the end, a gifted scene-painter saddled with an inconsistent dramatic instinct — a composer who could imagine a sunset better than he could imagine a plot. Ten minutes shorter than Pagliacci, and it feels every bit that much slighter. But the sunset stays with you. So, oddly, does the wedding music, long after the anvils have mercifully stopped.

Recommended, with the usual Opera Rara caveat: this is a disc for the curious and the completist, not the casual verismo tourist. It won’t replace Pagliacci in anyone’s affections. It doesn’t try to.