Paulo Abel do NASCIMENTO, sopranist The public's recent discovery of and curiosity for the repertoire dating from the turn of the eighteenth century have set problems of interpretation which, for the most part, have only been imperfectly resolved in our times, due to the lack of adequate voices. In the epoch known as the first golden age of bet canto, when Italian song was conquering Europe, the greater part of vocal music and, in particular, the main masculine roles in opera and Baroque cantatas were intended for the castrati, the incontestable stars of lyric art. (The last true castrato in the history of song was the sopranist Moreschi, first singer at the Sistine Chapel at the beginning of this century, who left a few recordings to posterity. With the primitive sound of acoustical phonography, we can guess at what were the timbres and the possibilities of such voices, so different from both a feminine voice and that of the falsetti we can hear nowadays). Generally in fact, there are currently three solutions for the interpretation of vocal music originally intended for the castrati. a/by a pure and simple transposition for baritone or tenor, resulting in a total falsification of the character and also the sonority of the music. b/by the use of women's voices, the singers having to be disguised if they are required to play a masculine role on stage. c/by the tempering use of the falsetti whose number has nicely multiplied in the last few years under the improperly-used term counter tenor. The falsetto technique was used in the middle ages when it was forbidden for women to sing in church. It was gradually abandoned when the effects of prepubescent castration on the development of the voices of young boys were discovered. Once the castrati became adult, there is no doubt that, as far as richness of timbre and vocal breadth is concerned, they had such possibilities in the soprano or alto register that the falsetti could not claim to possess. Without any intention of belittling the resurrection of the falsetti, who give a much greater credibility to the masculine roles of the Baroque repertoire written in this register with well differentiated voices from those of the feminine roles, it is however permitted to feel a certain frustration with the tonal limitations of the falsetto. It remains for Paulo Abel do Nascimento to reinstate another sonority in our times, different from both that of the masculine falsetto and that of the feminine mezzo-soprano. Incontestably, Paulo Abel so Nascimento appears to be a vocal phenomenon, physiologically speaking. In a way, he is a "natural castrato". His case has been profoundly examined medically, and it seems that, at puberty, he produced a minimal amount of that special hormone called testosterone which causes the change of voice. This explains why, without undergoing castration, which artificially stops the production of testosterone, he has kept the register of his child's voice with the development of the strength and the harmonic richness which the musculation of his adult age have brought. The end result is something "unheard of" in the true sense of the word, since the disappearance of the male soprani cultivated in the Baroque age. Paulo Abel do Nascimento was born in Brazil, at Fortaleza, in 1957. He was the fifteenth boy in a poor family. Amongst then he is the only one to inherit the taste for music from a great-grandmother who used to sing in the church. The purity of bis infantile timbre was noticed very early on at school and, at his young age, he wanted to become a professional singer. His unquestionable talents earned him a scholarship in spite of the small means of his parents, allowing him to enter the University of Sao-Paulo to study composition and orchestral conducting. It was there that the French musicologist Roger Cotte, who taught there, discovered him. Struck by the fact that, at twenty years of age, the young man's voice had not broken, Roger Cotte formed a quartet of male voices with Paulo Abel do Nascimento singing the mezzo and soprano parts. After the concerts in Sao-Paulo, an association of sponsors was formed to give Paulo the means of coming to Europe to work on vocal technique. In Italy in particular he perfected his study of Baroque style and made bis debut in 1981 on the Belgian radio. Since then he has given concerts in Paris and in the French provinces, made a recital tour of the United States and sung in the theatre the title role from Handel's Xerxes in Germany as well as Tamerlano in Italy. (Jacques Bourgeois, translated by David Sabey)