Word: countertenors
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...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...
...Knife. From the Renaissance through the 18th century the countertenor was the most popular singer in Europe. Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, and especially Henry Purcell, himself a countertenor, composed a wealth of lute songs, folk ballads, cantatas, hymns, operas, madrigals and carols for the male alto. The rage for the high-pitched male voice also helped give rise to the castrati singers-boy sopranos castrated before puberty. In 18th century Italy, parents received a handsome fee for each son to go under the knife. But with the dawning of the romantic era in the 19th century, the delicate voices...
...face of the inevitable snickering that the countertenor is unmanly, Deller wears a weary smile, answers simply: "I have two sons and a daughter." To those who are repelled by the sound of his voice, he says, "That's a problem they should work out with their psychiatrist. There are lots of men with fine countertenor voices, but because of the stigma they were trained as baritones. Fortunately, I never had any voice lessons, and so my voice developed naturally...
...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...