One of the five star countertenors in the recording of Vinci’s Artaserse I reviewed yesterday is Croatian-born Max Emanuel Cencic, who has been a vocal wonder since singing the Queen of the Night Aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute at age 7.
The album is a reissue of three albums plus made-for-TV portrait. The audio recordings, all made at the radio studios in Cologne, date from 2002, 2003 and 2004, in the first, full bloom of Cencic’s adult career as a countertenor. He is accompanied by a period-instrument ensemble made up of different musicians, depending on the recording session, all doing a fine job.
The music itself is a collection of secular cantatas by Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) and Antonio Caldara (1671-1736).
The five works each by Vivaldi and Caldara — plus four on the Scarlatti disc — feature a straightforward alternation of recitative and one or two arias, with the first Caldara cantata also including a short Sinfonia (Overture) as well as a beautiful Chaconne. The first work on the Scarlatti disc features an Introduction and short Minuet before the singing starts.
Cencic’s voice is remarkable and his technique as solid as Gibraltar. He also has a magnetic way with a musical phrase, making these hours of listening a pleasure form beginning to end.
The bonus DVD features about 15 minutes of singing as well as 45 minutes of documentary in which we follow the figuratively and literally colourful singer from Croatian wonder-treble (born to an opera-singing mother and conductor father) to his years as a member of the Vienna Boys Choir, to his slightly rocky road to being one of Europe’s favourite operatic countertenors.
One of the larger points Cencic underlines in an interview is how the realm of the countertenor has exploded over the past two decades. There are now so many fine singers that it is possible to divide them up into not just male altos but male mezzos and male sopranos, but the musical world hasn’t been able to agree on labels yet.
Cencic refers to himself as a male mezzo, but labels are immaterial when the singing is this fine.
For more details on the album, click here.
Here is Cencic in action with music by George Frideric Handel: An aria from act III of Xerxes recorded last year, followed by a little something from Messiah, back from the singer was a treble with the Vienna Boys Choir:
John Terauds