The 5 Countertenors

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Product Description ------------------- 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 ------ 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