Michael Maniaci: "Mozart Arias for Male Soprano"
Boston Baroque, Pearlman. Texts and translations. Telarc TEL 31827-02
Not every castrato was an illustrious singer. The greatest of them were said to combine unequaled power with extraordinary brilliance, sounding quite unlike either women or falsettists. But the dreadful operation itself was no guarantee of merit; just as in any vocal category, for every superb castrato there were many who were undistinguished.
It is useful to bear this in mind when listening to Michael Maniaci's work on this album. Billed as a "male soprano," he is a grown man whose voice never fully dropped. The publicity would have it that here genetics have produced a result similar to that formerly achieved by surgical means, an anomaly that lets Maniaci offer us an aural glimpse of the lost world of the castratos.
But on this disc, Maniaci's singing isn't all that interesting. The sound is neither brilliant nor forceful. Its most attractive element is a quick, pretty vibrato on sustained notes, but in the absence of other coloristic effects, even this soon becomes monotonous. At least as recorded here, Maniaci doesn't seem capable of much dynamic variety; one feels no particular quickening of energy in the concluding sections of two-part arias, simply because he isn't able to turn up the volume knob. Furthermore, his technique is patchy — the runs in "Exsultate Jubilate" are scrambled, and he chases after the roulades at the end of "Parto, parto" like a man pursuing a fast-departing bus.
What I miss most of all in Maniaci's singing, though, is impetus — the sense of an interpretive impulse shaping the musical line. The individual notes often carry no implications for those that follow. It's as if Maniaci's strange, cooing sound were an end in itself, rather than a means for making sense of Mozart's music.
At a recent master class (as reported in The New Yorker), the early-music master William Christie told Juilliard students, "Don't play what's on the page, or the score will be dead, deader than a doorknob." Maniaci could well take the advice. And so could conductor Martin Pearlman, who leads the Boston Baroque in performances that observe the niceties of historically informed performance while in no way presenting the selections as living, breathing entities. Mozart deserves better.
FRED COHN
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