Nearly a century after the 1683 siege of Vienna, with the Ottomans now at a safe distance, Austria was in the midst of a ‘Turkish craze’, manifested in the vogue for music imitating janissary bands (think Mozart’s ‘Rondo alla turca’) and operas with exotic eastern settings. Gluck’s harem rescue opera La rencontre imprévue (‘The unforeseen encounter’) had been a runaway success since its Viennese premiere in 1764. Eleven years later Haydn set an Italian adaptation of the same libretto as L’incontro improvviso as part of a lavish series of entertainments at the Esterházy court. For modern listeners pre-echoes of Mozart’s Entführung are unmissable: an abducted heroine (here Persian rather than European), her noble lover and his comic servant, a failed rescue attempt and an eleventh-hour show of clemency by the Sultan, who turns out to be a model Enlightenment ruler. That the setting here is Cairo rather than Baghdad or Istanbul would not have bothered Haydn’s gilded audience. For the 18th century steamy oriental locations could be shuffled at will.

Prince Nikolaus Esterházy liked his operas long and leisurely. And a problem with L’incontro for audiences today (partly shared with Die Entführung) is that what is essentially a comedy tends to proceed at the stately pace of opera seria. Beyond this, the libretto, by Esterházy tenor Carl Friberth, is a pretty amateurish piece of work. Characterisation is inconsistent and key dramatic moments – especially the reunion of the heroine Rezia and her Indian lover Prince Ali (Haydn Sikh?) – go for little. As usual in his operas, Haydn seems to have set what was in front of him, uncritically.

Still, from the swashbuckling Overture, complete with ‘Turkish’ cymbals and triangle, the opera offers many incidental pleasures: a pair of splendid bravura arias for heroine and hero in Act 2, their (belated) tender love duet, and pseudo-oriental comic songs for the fake dervish Calandro, the butt of Friberth’s anti-clerical satire. The plum of the whole score is the sensuous ‘dream’ trio for Rezia and her two confidantes, Balkis and Dardane, with its lingering suspensions and dusky scoring for cors anglais and muted strings.

L’incontro was pretty well served by the 1980 recording conducted by Antal Dorati in his Haydn opera series. This new version has its points, above all the spruce, well-turned playing of the period band under Michi Gaigg’s lively direction. But on the whole Dorati fields a superior cast; and he scores emphatically by presenting the opera virtually uncut where Gaigg omits around half an hour of music, most damagingly the first half of the Act 2 finale (why?).

The soubrettish Elisabeth Breuer deftly negotiates the coloratura flights in Rezia’s C major showpiece ‘Or vicina a te’ but tends to sound bland elsewhere, with minimal variety of colour and dynamics. Haydn’s tenor roles for Carl Friberth are notoriously challenging in range and agility. As Prince Ali, Bernhard Berchtold works hard but only just clings on in the vertiginous leaps of his martial aria ‘Il guerrier con armi avvoluto’. For mellifluous ease Dorati’s Claes H Ahnsjö is in a different class. On the older recording the Calandro (Benjamin Luxon) and the comic servant Osmin (Domenico Trimarchi) also eclipse their modern counterparts in zest and Italianate brio. It always helps to have a native speaker in Italian comic roles, and Trimarchi gleefully makes the point. The playing of Dorati’s Lucerne Chamber Orchestra may seem a little ‘juicy’ for modern tastes. But for anyone who fancies investigating Haydn’s modestly entertaining harem opera, old decisively trumps new.