Word: countertenors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...flexible soprano voices, he would doll up the music with ornaments and, if another soprano complained, he would steal a few arias from the first soprano and slip them to the second. To further befuddle historians, Handel was continually juggling arias to fit whatever boy soprano, male alto or countertenor happened along. As a result, a wide range of different but thoroughly authentic "original versions" of the oratorio came into being...
...blessed souls in heaven." TheGloria, a quodlibet of Lutheran chorale melodies was precisely thought out and excellently proportioned among the voices. As for the seven soloists, the men were more distinguished than the women in regard to vocal blend if not phrasing, with Daniel Collins, the countertenor, David Evitts, the baritone, and Mark Pearson, the bass-baritone, producing the finest singing. The mezzosoprano and soprano, Jan Curtis and Susan Stevens, sounded totally alien, much as if one were simultaneously listening to a barrel-organ and a celeste. The choir was improperly overbalanced by the women, except in the Gloria...
...probably fall short of Monteverdi's intentions. In his day, singers, not composers or conductors, were kings; and no modern revival can ever recapture their singular contributions to a performance. For instance, two major roles in Poppea, scored for castrato voices, are sung in this recording by a countertenor and tenor, who provide earnest but ghostly approximations of the old score. The album, however, gives fine hints of how early Italian baroque opera sounded: intimate, civilized, and a trifle boring to modern ears...
...centuries rolled back. Deller's voice is like no other sound in music, and no other sound is so intrinsically musical." His debut was a grand success, and at 31 he found himself a one-man renaissance hailed by London critics as responsible for "the rebirth of the countertenor...
...renaissance so far has produced only some half a dozen other professional countertenors, including, most notably, the U.S.'s Russell Oberlin. To help perpetuate the species, Deller is grooming his older son Mark, 27, to assume his mantle: "His voice is exactly like mine-uncannily so." The resurgence of baroque music, Deller thinks, is led by the younger generation, who "have chosen to sidestep the romantics. They no longer want their ears invaded by the oozy wash of sound. They prefer instead to hear counter point, to hear the architecture of the music. It is a restatement...