[YouTube Link]
Phillippe Jaroussky has a voice like none other, unless maybe you’re talking about a female or a young boy. Check out a snippet of the NY Times piece of the phenom who made his debut in 1999 at 21 years old.
The countertenorial voice — a high girlish tone produced by using the outer edges of the vocal cords — is something of an acquired taste, continually teetering on the knife edge between creepy and sublime. Jaroussky himself is well aware of what he describes as its “element of repulsion.”
“It’s true that there is something potentially ridiculous about this voice coming out of a man’s body,” Jaroussky told me when we first met. “People talk about the countertenor being a third sex, or something quasi female, but I think for me it’s more a way of staying a child.” The voice does not, as some might have it, appeal chiefly to gay men: much of pre-19th-century opera — or for that matter, Shakespearean comedy — is based on the understanding that what drives a woman wild is a boy who may or may not be a girl.
Watch the video above then practice like you can do that. We thought The-Dream went high!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
castration anyone?
his voice is just too good yum yum