Alan Yentob’s
frequently beguiling TV series, Imagine, consists of well-ridden, quirky and
often obscure hobby-horses. Last night
he daringly examined male falsetto singing.
I say “daringly”
because many men tend to draw only one conclusion about full-grown members of
their tribe who twitter away in the soprano range. Little do they know, since several
“falsettists” revealed women are often attracted to such singing, reckoning it to
be evidence of a gentler, more sensitive alternative to the hairy chests.
But where are
they employed? Leading gospel choirs and in close-harmony barbers shop quartets
seemed to suggest these voices are only suited to slowish, often humdrum songs. Not so, since both The Beach Boys and the Bee Gees made good use of
them. And falsetto’s pop apogee occurs with Queen where Freddie Mercury
multi-tracks his voice to the point where the different layers eerily “pulse”
in a way I thought required more than one singer. Making a sound I can only describe
as beautiful.
All of which was
news to me but Yentob was moving towards something I do know a little about –
counter-tenors, otherwise known as male altos. Despite forcing myself to be
open-minded I must confess I am occasionally uneasy listening to counter-tenors,
not because of their range, rather their timbre. A little too flutey. But I’ll
make an exception with Iestyn Davies (pictured). We’d heard him recently in
Handel’s opera Rodelinda but here he sang an achingly gorgeous Purcell song
(Name forgotten, damnit) which left me unequivocal: this was echt counter-tenor
territory.
Afterwards,
Davies spent several minutes teaching Yentob to explore the counter-tenor range
with his own voice and there were further techno-sessions where a voice
specialist, using a fibre-optic probe, showed how one singer’s vocal cords
coped with these upper flights. Good on yer, BBC.