June 7: Cantatas (Orchester der J.S. Bach-Siftung; Rudolf Lutz, conductor)

I don't like countertenor singing. Why?

We’re all burdened with cultural baggage that shape our musical tastes. Bach would not have understood Nirvana one bit, and I’ll go out on a limb and say Kurt Cobain never connected with The Art of Fugue. Seat them for dinner and give them a universal translator and they’d still be speaking past each other.

This gap remains amongst the living, most strikingly between musical genres. For some of you, when you hear jazz, you’ll reject it out of hand (‘this music is not for me because it sounds weird / it’s cheesy / belongs in a smoky club seventy years ago / irrelevant to my life’). After decades of deep listening, I am comfortable with (most of) the jazz language and can evaluate the music on its own terms. I can’t say the same for metal, EDM, punk, and other schools where I’ve made no connection.

Then there’s your taste within the the genres you like. My wife listens to many singer-songwriters, but she doesn’t care for Elvis Costello — she calls it ‘music for boys’. (She once said this to a group of musicians who split with her exactly on gender lines, it was great.)

Finally, there is taste within the music you like. In Year of Bach, I’ve been marinating mostly in this category.

I say this all to wind up a confession: I don’t care for countertenor singers.

These are men who sing in falsetto to reach the alto range, a part that moderns are accustomed to hearing women sing. This casting choice is more historically accurate — in Bach’s day, women weren’t allowed to sing in church, so the high parts were sung by boys and men — but to my ears it doesn’t serve the music best.

In pop and rock, I like when guys sing way up — Freddie Mercury, Steve Perry, Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey, even the Bee Gees work. But in a classical context, the ideal is to have a women singing the alto part.

The only justifications I have for my preference are an internalized homophobia, and a base yearning for a specific kind of femininity. I often hear Bach’s alto parts as if they are written for consoling and maternal voices. That’s cultural baggage I can acknowledge, while still owning the fact that I still want those voices to be female.

Today I’m writing about two volumes of Cantatas by the Swiss Rudolf Lutz conducting the Orchester der J.S. Bach-Siftung, which feature the countertenor Alex Potter. He sings well enough, but I’d rather his gig have gone to a woman.

YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music

YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music

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These albums cover the Cantatas BWV 2, 37, 69a, 102, and 185. On to highlights:

Here’s the countertenor Potter singing the third movement of BWV 2. “Guy singing high” feels ‘off’ to me relative to “lady singing low-ish”:

In the opening of BWV 185, listen to the talky guy and the angelic lady, very different singing styles:

The orchestra keeps a consistent pace to set a foundation for the singers in the third movement of BWV 37:

In the opening of BWV 102, the soloists trade the lead line and sing in support of each other — “Lord, your eyes look for faith!”:

I’ll close with a bit of nice singing from the baritone Matthias Helm in the second movement of BWV 102, especially the very last word he sings. “Where is the might of his word, if all improvement disappears from our hearts?”