Porpora / Broschi / Giacomelli - Arias for Farinelli

The singer, Genaux, possesses a voice surprisingly similar in timbres to the electronically blended sound on the Farinelli soundtrack. While a little grainy or edgy in parts of her range, it has the burnished warm sounds that float and are easy throughout much of the very difficult tessitura. These is a terrific activity or direction in all the coloratura that is never rushed or pushed in tempo, but keeps moving forward and gives shapes to the very long florid lines. The long stretches of the cantabile arias are wrapped in velvet and have several heart-stopping moments.

It is not hard to understand why these arias were the purview of one of the greatest singers of a bygone age, what is hard to understand is why this music has been missing from the repertoire for so long. Also, when considering the voice of the castrato, it is important to remember that they were boy sopranos originally, whose mutilation maintained their pre-pubecent vocal condition of "falsetto". However, the real facility of their voices came from very long years of incredibly rigorous vocal and musical training, castrati often were already a part of the conservatorios before their mutilation. This training cultivates the head voice in ways that only few of the modern day countertenors have achieved. It is wrong to think that the sound is vastly different from countertenors, and that the clarity of the female voice is the only comparison.

Whatever the problems with the album, it is a fantastic performance, more perfect than any other that I for one have ever heard, it still can be ranked with a landmark recording, one that can be held up with those of the legends.

No small credit should be given also to Rene Jacobs and the wonderful musicians of the Akadamie fur Alte Musik Berlin. Indeed, they are the instrumental equals of both Genaux's voice and her technique.

I have read other reviewers who have said that Rene Jacobs waited for twenty years to find someone with a voice to handle these arias, and that the world waited two hundred and twenty - since Farinell's death. Well, the wait is over, and we are the lucky ones!

Simply put, if I were stranded on the proverbial desert island, and could only take, say, five CDs, please believe this would be one.

I would suggest that everyone who listens to this CD begin by reading the very long, but very informative, explanations of the Castrato voice, and of Farinelli himself. There is a wealth of information, including how voices were trained, and what voices were used to trade off when a castrato soprano was not available. COUNTERTENORS were NEVER used. They existed, but they simply didn't have the sound that compared. The usual choice for composers was a FEMALE CONTRALTO with a good upper range. This upper range was not like we think of high notes today. In fact, no singer until the end of the 1880's had high notes like we are used to today. Their upper notes were very penetrating, but not super loud. The strength of the voice was its chest and lower notes. Most Castrati sang well, even to very strong powerful notes over an octave below middle C, and were still called "sopranos."

Looking at the scores of these pieces, you will not find one high note written there, and those that do venture above the staff are very quickly sung. However, most all of the pieces venture below the staff, and often start a phrase as low as the A below middle C. If one looks at Farinelli's own embellishments, one hardly ever sees him venturing above a high A and then very quickly. In his youth he may have had a High F but he never would have used it the way we expect singers like Joan Sutherland to sing it.

So, if we can just get over a few things we have been conditioned to think (which are completely wrong) that the countertenor voice has any resemblance to the Castrato (which it doesn't; composers of the period have proven through their choices a contralto or dark mezzo represented far more accurately the castrato voice), that voices sang with no vibrato (they did, and it gave warmth to the music, that is why eventually string players learned to use a vibrato, we have used instrumental technique, which were decades behind vocal technique, to decide how vocalist sang, organs as early as 11 hundred were built with a "la Voce" stop, which actually played two notes back and forth to immitate a vibrato, so obviously the voice did vibrate), and that the castrato has some super human capacity for volume (their breathing and focus training was unique to them, and often not taught to other singers of their day; women worse corsets and so their breathing was shallow, but what they were trained to do is commonly done today for most singers, so their volume would have compared to our more modern sound, only their high notes would not have been anywhere as loud as we are used to hearing).

If we are willing to learn from facts, then we will be ready to listen to this performance. What we hear is a wonderful singer doing a wonderful job with music that is very difficult to sing. It would have been nicer if her voice was more powerful in the lower reaches, for much of the music is quite low. Most of her embellishments are authentic to the times, but only one piece actually uses all the embellishments that were used by Farinelli himself, and that is the last piece, "Quelle'Usignolo." This disk was a really refreshing experience. It was wonderful to finally hear the words when the vocal line was lower, rather than the nasal twang the countertenors often bring to it, and nice to hear upper notes that actually came forth easily. It was nice to hear warmth to a voice singing this music, rather than something akin to scratching ones fingernails down the blackboard. It was nice to hear some "presence" some "personality" in the music, which more often than not it never has. As Vivica Genaux's voice grows and darkens, if she never loses her wonderful agility, then she truly will give this music the life it desperately needs to take it out of the frozen museum piece prison it has been relegated to in the more "authentic recordings" we are often subjected to.