The highs and the lows

From playing rugged heroes in Handel's day, countertenors now get to sing only 'extraterrestrials and fairies'. A shame, says Michael Church

Never mock the humble comma: much may hang on its absence, as with this contemporary account of the premiere of Purcell's "Hail! Bright Cecilia", in which we are told that the second stanza, starring a high-voiced male, "was sung with incredible graces by Mr Purcell himself". On this evidence, generations of music historians have claimed that Purcell, in addition to being a bass, was also a falsettist. Not so, says the Purcell authority Peter Holman: the "incredible graces" were the written ornamentations he'd added to the basic melodic line. To mean that Purcell himself was the singer, he argues, the phrase would have had to be framed by commas.

A small matter? Not if you're writing the history of countertenors, in which Britain's greatest composer would have made a glittering Exhibit A. Purcell wrote for the English countertenors who wanted to imitate the Italian castrati then in vogue, but as Holman points out: "'Countertenor' to Purcell didn't mean a voice; it meant a range. And that meant one of three things: a tenor singing naturally at the top of his range; a tenor who could artificially extend his range by going into falsetto; or a church singer doing the alto lines falsetto, as they still do in cathedrals today." Like many other things in "early music", the countertenor voice is largely a 20th-century invention.

To be precise, it is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, for it was in 1944 that Sir Michael Tippett discovered Alfred Deller humbly singing in Canterbury choir, and declared that "in that moment, the centuries rolled back." Launched as a concert artist by Tippett, Deller was then picked up by Benjamin Britten, who wrote his opera A Midsummer Night's Dream as a vehicle for what was, in the operatic world, a completely new sound. The word "countertenor" had been extinct for 300 years, with the voice itself leading a shadowy existence in church. It did have a parallel life in barbershop quartets, and its place in popular music long pre-dated The Beach Boys, The Bee Gees and many singers since, including the irrepressible Martyn Jacques, whose "junk opera" Shock-Headed Peter has been packing them in at the Lyric Hammersmith. But in classical terms, the voice was castrated, artistically if not physically.

Its first 60 years in the limelight are framed by two events this week. While Harmonia Mundi's boxed set Alfred Deller: Portrait of a Legend hits the shops, David Daniels is making his recital debut at the Barbican. Between Deller's ethereal Elizabethanism and Daniels's luxurious sensuality of tone, you sense the whole history of countertenordom laid out like an evolutionary chart showing the ascent of man. Moreover, Deller may have been a contented paterfamilias, but he was always defensive about the sexuality of his voice: though Britten created a role for him, he was miserably ill at ease on the operatic stage. By contrast, Daniels is confidently and openly gay and has the swagger of a superstar (look at the website his fans have created for him). Yet while Daniels says that his gayness colours his singing, plenty of countertenors are heterosexual - most notably that other superstar with an overheated unofficial site, Andreas Scholl. These are deeply ambiguous waters.

When Deller was found wanting as a theatrical animal, James Bowman - another cathedral alto - moved in as Oberon instead. And from that point on, the countertenor was seen not as a lone voice crying in the wilderness - a role Deller secretly enjoyed - but as the epitome of glamour and style. Bowman immediately started reclaiming repertoire that had been colonised by basses, tenors and, above all, women. When I asked how he felt recording the title role in Handel's Giulio Cesare shortly after Janet Baker had sung it, he gave a typically swashbuckling reply: "She was wonderful in the role, but she was also - shall we say? - handicapped. Whatever my faults, people generally agree that I sound like a man." You can say that again: no countertenor before or since has managed to match his brilliant clarion sound.

Asked how his voice was produced, he gave this answer: "By using the edge of your vocal cords and neglecting the central part, which is the bass area. It's like playing harmonics on a violin. I can sing bass - I use it to warm up with, before I sing countertenor. But I can't keep it up for long - it feels odd." He admitted that the countertenor voice could be described as fake: "It's an acquired technique. Nobody speaks in that register." But he insisted that there neither is nor should be any pejorative insinuation in "falsetto". He might have added that there is a school of thought that holds "falsetto" to be a misnomer, in that the voice-production involved, though demanding, is not unnatural.

With a brilliant career behind him, and nearly 200 records to his name, Bowman is now taking life gently, but he was engagingly sardonic about the burgeoning field. "Hopeless", "a boring choirboy" and "Crufts dog show" were some of his less defamatory verdicts on the contenders from one compilation CD. And even among the top quality, the voice has taken on a multiplicity of forms. The Belgian René Jacobs infused it with melting femininity; the East German Jochen Kowalski injected camp; the black American Derek Lee Ragin came across like a diva. The old French haut-contre tradition has led to a countertenor mode unique to that land. Michael Chance - whose heroes were Deller and Bowman - has patented a tone peculiarly English in its watercolour timbre; he has also expanded the repertoire by commissioning works from Tan Dun, Judith Weir and Harrison Birtwistle.

And then there is the extraordinary Andreas Scholl. Tutored by Jacobs and Bowman, this Clark Kent lookalike from Wiesbaden took the world by storm with his heart-stoppingly pure sound. And apart from one recording gaffe - folk songs he should have left well alone - each new CD has reinforced his Baroque dominance. Meanwhile, he has another life as well: any month now, Decca may release a record he has created in his private studio: "soul-funk for grown-ups" is the label he pins on it. You never know what this boy will do next.

If America initially lagged behind in the countertenor stakes, it has more than made up for it with an army of stars, in which David Daniels is pre-eminent. His vocal trajectory is interesting: a treble until the late age of 17, he then turned into a competition-standard tenor but found his voice kept cracking in the high register. "I got very depressed, and finally went to my teacher and said: 'I have this other voice. Do you want to hear it?' " He did, so Daniels brought out the falsetto he had been privately entertaining his friends with - and the rest is history.

This all-American boy, whose other special talent is for basketball, believes the tenor lurking within "contributes resonance and bite" to his singing, and, after a period of being very upfront about his gender-bending voice, now soft-pedals such talk. "In some ways," he says, "it's crazy to talk about femininity in my voice, but it would be ridiculous to say that it doesn't sound feminine at all, because it obviously does." Mentioning the similarity between his tone and that of the late, great Katherine Ferrier, I ask whether he perceives any fundamental difference between her voice and those of countertenors such as him. "Yes - she's a woman." But if you were listening blind? "I would still know." How? "I don't know." Is it not an interesting question? "Yes, but does it matter?" But you've had reviews comparing you to her! "I take them as a compliment, and just carry on."

He's much more forthright on the absence of satisfying new operatic roles. "What I want is a part that doesn't make me sound like an extraterrestrial. From Britten right through to Philip Glass, it has been extraterrestrials and fairies all the way." What you really want, I suggest, is what Handel created - full-blooded masculine roles. "Absolutely. You can put quotes around that." In other words, back to the future. Only then will the countertenor evolution be complete.

David Daniels, Barbican, London EC2 (0207 638 8891) 7 May, 7.30pm