Then again, if people have not heard it, and they see a man singing high, we start again from square one. Within the next 10, 20 years, whoever knows the sound of Pavarotti will also know the sound of the countertenor. And then, with conductors like William Christie and René Jacobs, early music broke out of specialized festivals and started appearing in Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall. The question was still: How can this man sing so high? Over the years, early music audiences learned what to expect. When I started performing countertenor, around 1989, it was clearly still something very exotic. How has the public reaction to Baroque music and the countertenor voice evolved during your career? Music facilitates the communication of the story, but it always serves the words, and that makes it attractive to me. Baroque composers say, “Prima le parole”: First the words and the story. It became more of a sound-creating instrument and less of a text-communicating one. What later opera lost was the rhetorical aspect of the human voice. Is the formulaic nature of Baroque music also its limit?Ī.

Schubert, partly because of the piano, uses a bigger vocal and emotional brush. Dowland paints with the same amount of shades and colors, but on a much smaller frame. In Schubert, the human being is always part of something bigger, always part of nature. His songs express very personal thoughts, even depression. Why does Dowland, an often-overlooked composer of the Renaissance, speak to you more than Schubert?ĭowland wrote at a time when the individual was the center of the song. We probably move in waves, and depending whether we are on the crest or the bottom of the wave, we find echoes of past times that correspond to our sensitivities.

There were times in the past where the collective sensitivity about melancholy and love and nature was extremely close to ours. I’ve been doing early music all my life, and the psychology of John Dowland - the melancholy, the language - is closer to me than that in Schubert songs. I also don’t think there’s any linearity in the evolution of taste.

Festival music in spectre film