Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857-1919) was a peculiarly hit-and-miss composer. Perhaps he peaked too early, jumping on the verismo bandwagon in 1892 with Pagliacci, a direct response to Mascagni’s hugely successful Cavalleria Rusticana. He then proceeded to flounder. I Medici (1893) was an awkwardly Wagnerian affair that found little favour, nor did the sprawling La Bohème (1897), rapidly eclipsed by Puccini’s superior effort. He bounced back in 1902 with the sweetly sentimental Zazà, but it would be a decade before he hit gold again with Zazà, which premiered in London in 1912 and enjoyed a surprisingly long run at the Hippodrome Theatre of all places. 

British musical rehabilitation experts Opera Rara demonstrated the virtues of Zazà back in 2016, and here they pull off the same trick with Zingari, a work that proves if anything even more resourceful than its predecessors, Pagliacci excepted. Packed with lyrical melodies and ‘local’ colour, it’s single 60-minute rhapsodic...