Something Wired - Farinelli Etc

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Handel / Rinaldo - Farinelli Il Castrato (1994) - Lascia Ch'io Pianga

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In the absence of any living castrato to fill the lead role in the film, Farinelli's reputedly astonishing range and power has been recreated for the film by the Paris-based IRCAM electronics laboratory. By overlapping the voices of the American countertenor Derek Lee Ragin and the Polish soprano Ewa Mallas-Godlewska, and then morphing them into a single entity, IRCAM - the electronic institute created by Pierre Boulez - has created a Cybercastrato for the end of the 20th century. Synched to the sensuous lips of the Farinelli character, - played by Stefano Dionisi and posed by the filmmakers as a flamboyant glam savage cross between Freddie Mercury and a dandified Blixa Bargeld (of Einsturzende Neubauten) , it's easy to see how the great castrati singers became the pop idols of their day: they made nuns and maidens swoon, while the sheer beauty of their voices precipitated Ii male listeners all manner of anxieties, and prompted predictable insults. God-like their voices might have been, but the castrati's audiences were also there to gape at the outsize, caponesque geeks producing such heavenly sounds. Alternately ridiculed and exalted, the ambivalent response to the great castrato singers fixed the pattern for all high male singers to come. And not only in the public mind: contemporary composers continue to cast male altos and countertenors the castrato singers' natural, undoctored successors -as either gods or monsters. "I would love it if someday if a guy would write us a part that wasn't totally off the wall," dreams The Hilliard Ensemble's countertenor David James, "a part where I'll maybe get to do a love duet with a soprano."

Philippe de Monte - Parce Mihi, Domine (Motette zu 6 Stimmen)

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Proving once again  that Wire covers more genres than any other monthly magazine.

For sallymn

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