Mozert: Arias for Coloraturas and Coloring Books (SACD-RW review)

Anna Moffet Field, contrasoprano; Rt. Honorable Maestoso M. Micetrow, M.S.S.E., North Essex Sinfonia at South Wessex. Wicca Wecords BMW 750i.

It isn't often I get a chance to review the work of musical prodigy Michael Tilson Herbert Georg Otto Bernard Mozert the Lesser (1712-1723), father of the renowned flautist and Doppelganger M.T.H.G.O.B. Mozert the Greater (c. 1704-1724). So it's a distinct honor for me, knowing as I do the younger man's penchant for flouting the flute, to hear so authoritative an interpretation as that from Maestoso M. Micetrow and his incomparable North Wessex at South Essex singers, players, and occasional hangers-on.

A little-known fact about Mozert (the Lesser), and one that constantly bewitches, bothers, and bewilders almost everyone who hears it, is that he originally wrote his Arias for Coloraturas and Coloring Books in 1735 for the noted mezzanine-soprano Mifeter Callous, a notorious dropper of names and notes. However, after a furious row over having to do the second aria da capo a cappella, Ms. Callous threatened to have her uncle, at the time a powerful capo, have poor Mozert capped. As getting capped by a capo for an a cappella capo was not the composer's idea of a capital idea, he reconsidered the proposition and assigned the part to his niece, the Italian castrato Don Vito Ivanitchie.

Anyway, I digress with these mesmerizing antidotes. As I say, it isn't often I get the chance to listen to such lilting and diverting arias so deliciously transcribed for bullhorn and woodwinds, so the opportunity is not lost on me. Unfortunately, the point remains lost, so let me seize upon the occasion to relate a story of young Mozert's encounter one afternoon in his youth with the redoubtable balloonist Professor Oscar Zoroaster Marvel and their subsequent travails in a far-off magical land somewhere over the.... But I digress again.

Countersoprano A.M. Field does an ab fab job fielding every note she's thrown and pitching a perfect score throughout the series, her West Essex support well up on their game. My only ersatz caveat, and a pejorative one at that, would be Maestro Micetrow's penchant for slackening his gait out the gate, tending to pause and crochet at the second and third crochets while poor Ms. Field has to sit and sew. I'd swear I heard her walk off the stage at one needle point.

Be that as it may, the whole affair is well catered by Wicca producer Michel Bay, who did his best to feed all the players and capture their sound before they fled. Recorded at the Little Chapel of the Crying Nuns (El Minuto Chapelle a le Nunne de la Crynoutlouda), Isole delle Femmine, Sicily, in 1738, the sound is big and bold, with the tonal resonance of a fine, chocolatey mousse mixed with the fleeting scent of bitter almonds.

I should note in closing that three years after their meeting, Micetrow and Bay eloped and are now living with seven children near a small shrub in Lompoc, California. Swell the music, Maestro. I love happy endings.

Or, as the celebrated music critic Alphonse K. Traz once remarked, quoting Ben Franklin, "Hunger is the best pickle." Yawrp.

JJP