David Daniels on Being the World's Leading Countertenor

Daniels as Oberon at the Lyric
Opera of Chicago (Photo: Dan Rest)

"Few singers active over the past twenty years have changed the American opera landscape as radically as David Daniels. When the countertenor first emerged on the scene in the early 1990s, falsettists were still widely considered something of an anomaly on many of the world's opera stages. Yet in the span of a few short years, Daniels and a handful of colleagues changed all that. The sickly sweet, overripe-English-choirboy timbres of Alfred Deller and James Bowman seemed to fade out in the wake of Daniels's full-throated, agile sound of genuinely operatic intensity and ardor. With Daniels's success came a newfound understanding by audiences of the vitality of the Baroque repertory, as well as a world of possibilities for the next generation of talented countertenors. Now forty-five, Daniels clearly knows his worth as a performer and looks forward to a string of high-profile engagements. This season he sings Arsamene in performances of San Francisco Opera's Serse before creating the role of Prospero in the Met's new Baroque pasticcio, The Enchanted Island, on New Year's Eve; in February and March, he takes on the title role in Lyric Opera of Chicago's new production of Rinaldo. OPERA NEWS caught up with Daniels at the end of August, while he was in the midst of unpacking following a three-month absence from his Atlanta home." Read the full article at Opera News by clicking here.