Product Description
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Decca's new release brings together five of the world's most
renowned countertenors, who bring the rich world of baroque opera
to life. Once rarely heard, countertenors are now firmly
established on the operatic stage and concert platform and their
popularity has reached an all-time high. This album features
virtuosic highlights from baroque opera and showcases the
extraordinary abilities of five astonishing artists: Max Emanuel
Cencic, Yuriy Mynenko, Valer Sabadus, Xavier Sabata and Vince Yi.
Review
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Thus did the famous poet and dramatist William Congreve describe
the celebrated trebble John Abell in a letter dated 10 December
1700. Such are the currents of musical history, however, that
even fifty years ago the idea of a gala of countertenors would
have seemed extraordinary, even inconceivable. But in that same
half-century the voice type has moved far beyond the chapel and
the cathedral that had for so long seemed its only home. Now
firmly entrenched on concert platforms, opera stages and the
covers of music magazines, countertenors are the subjects of
heated on-line debate and of fan-pages on social media.
In a performing world where the historically informed is still
very fashionable, this is all the more remarkable when one
considers that the voice today called countertenor one largely
based on a highly developed technique of signing in falsetto has
very little physiologically to do with the castrati for whom all
the music on this was written. The falsetto function, a
completely natural component of the vocal equipment of any adult
male, involves singing on the edges of the vocal folds. In the
majority of men it remains undeveloped and weak, but in a
fortunate few it can become an instrument of great beauty, colour
and agility. Castrati, on the other hand, sang on vocal folds
unaltered by puberty, and with the benefit of perhaps a decade of
unbroken training during adolescence. Their physical state
fortunately cannot be reproduced today, but the extravagant
virtuosity of their performance perhaps can.
The modern revival of interest in Baroque opera seria, an
operatic form utterly dominated by the castrati, posed the great
problem of who should sing their music. During the eighteenth
century, if a castrato were not available his role would have
been sung by a woman en travesti rather than a countertenor, not
least because the latter did not have the vocal or theatrical
training required for such taxing roles at that time a
countertenor was quite simply not a creature of the stage. This
historical fact has sometimes been used to disparage today s
countertenors, but performance-based pragmatism, public taste and
the sheer ability of the rising countertenor generation
increasingly provide a convincing riposte to such musicologically
based arguments (as well as perhaps being a cause of concern to
some lady mezzo-sopranos and contraltos and occasionally
sopranos). Successful character portrayal, matched by vocal
prowess of the first order, is regarded by many promoters,
directors and audiences as more important than the laryngeal
mechanisms involved or the gender of the singer... --Nicholas
Clapton