Ever since the revelatory pioneering work of Alfred Deller, more than 50 years ago, the male falsetto has often been considered an acquired taste. However, as the fine concert, The Art of the Countertenor, revealed to its audience (in the neo-Renaissance auditorium of the City Hall during the Brisbane Baroque Festival), like, wine, this style of singing is not a single ‘taste’ at all. Part of the thrill of the occasion was relishing three distinct voices and three decidedly different performers, all of whom had been principals in Handel’s Agrippina, the key-stone event of the Festival.

The repertoire was composed for castrati and a further part of the delight of the concert was the reminder of what celebrities they were in their era and just why: this exhilarating music had been written for both audiences and composers to revel in the combination of high technical accomplishment and unique expressive powers of those singers. Of course, for anatomical reasons, modern falsettists cannot reveal the totality of that formidable artistic accomplishment, but these three singers came gratifyingly close to doing so.

^{Russell Harcourt}

The Australian, Russell Harcourt is not really an ‘alto’ as this...