Farinelli and Co.: Vienna stages first countertenor festival

Austrian ORF radio will next week host Vienna's first-ever countertenor festival, two days of concerts dedicated to music for "castrati", adult male singers castrated to preserve their high, angelic soprano voices.

Austrian countertenor, Markus Forster, joins his German and Swiss colleagues, Kai Wessel and Terry Wey, as well as promising newcomers in a wide programme of works ranging from the renaissance and baroque, classical and romantic repertoire through to 20th century compositions, ORF said in a statement Thursday.

Modern-day countertenors are no longer castrated, but cultivate a special technique for singing the alto or soprano ranges using a falsetto or head voice instead.

For many years in the classical music scene, there has been increasing interest in so-called period or authentic performance and techniques, where music is performed on instruments dating back to the period when the work was actually composed. The aim is to recreate a sound closer to the composer's original intentions.

As a result, there has also been a corresponding rise in interest in period or authentic vocal techniques and a number of countertenors have shot to international fame in recent years, including British-born James Bowman and Germany's Andreas Scholl.

The practice of castrating boy singers before their voices broke came about in the 16th century as a result of the church's ban on women as both preachers and singers, meaning males had to sing the alto or soprano parts.

While castration was actually forbidden by the church, the practice continued, and there were an estimated 100 castrati in Rome at the end of the 16th century and more than 200 by the mid 17th century.

The last known castrato was Alessandro Moreschi who sang in Rome's Sistine Chapel and died in 1922.

Carestini, Caffarelli and Farinelli are perhaps the best-known exponents of the art.

They were the singing superstars of Italian opera in the 17th and 18th centuries. And the leading composers of the day -- including Handel and Vivaldi -- regularly vied to write some of their greatest operatic roles for them.

Farinelli was even the subject of an Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning film by Belgian director Gerard Corbiau in 1994.

Among the works being performed in ORF's RadioKulturhaus on Monday and Tuesday are arias by Handel and cantatas by Bach, but also pieces by British 20th century composer Benjamin Britten and German composer Hans Eisler.

The singers will be accompanied by the Vienna-based early music ensemble, Bach Consort Wien and the vocal group Cinquecento.