Pratum Integrum Orchestra - Rosetti: Bohemian Mutineer (2005) [SACD]

Caro Mitis has chosen an intriguing and amusing title for a disc of Antonio Rosetti as performed by Russian period instrument group Pratum Integrum Orchestra: Bohemian Mutineer. Its front cover is emblazoned with an old etching of a gigantic fish that would certainly stir up mutiny if it swam up to a vessel filled with nervous sailors. While all of this is very attention grabbing, as Bohemia was a completely landlocked region, one wonders how a Bohemian sailor would gain such experience as to cause a mutiny, but perhaps the point is to paint Rosetti as a radical, a composer whose music blazed new trails in the last part of the eighteenth century that he belonged. It is true that he was an outstanding composer of instrumental music who was viewed in his time as the equal of Mozart and Haydn, and this truth is further amplified in that Rosetti had a provincial musical education and worked in minor courts, having only glancing contact major music centers like Paris and Berlin; he never set foot in Vienna. Unlike Franz Ignaz Beck, who was a "mutineer" in both his work and life, or Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, who brilliantly maintained the classical-era status quo, Rosetti aimed for the middle, placing him in a class of composers whose aims were very much in sympathy with what Mozart was trying to achieve; grace, eloquence, wit, and that extra, indefinable something that captures one's ear and imagination.