Palestrina - La Cruda Mia Nemica - Allesandro Moreschi and other soloists

You'll read a lot of nonsense about Allesandro Moreschi having been a great singer when, if he hadn't been the "last of the castrati" I doubt anyone would look on the recordings of his voice as much more than a miscellaneous curiosity.   After having listened to all of the available recordings of his voice - or as close to those as you can get online, I think this is the he one that gives you the best idea of how really mediocre an artist he was.  The tenor and bass on this recording and even the countertenor-alto are better singers, even with the pretty anachronistic romantic-operatic qualities of all of them inappropriately used for Palestrina's counterpoint.   Moreschi obviously made up for a lack of training and taste with hamming it up.  This has nothing in it that compares with the record of written music sung by and composed for the castrati of the earlier centuries.   The male-sopranists of today are a closer approximation of those abilities, if not of the actual voice, and there is no way to know that for the best of them.   I couldn't find a recording of that particular madrigal that I wanted to post, though there are better ones on Youtube.

Here is one of the very best of those who sing in the top register,  Franco Fagioli (yes, the beard is real) singing one of the last roles written for the castrati, Arsace in Rossini's Aureliano in Palmira from 1813.

And Michael Maniaci, one of the very, very rare natural adult male sopranos, singing in full chest register the very last of the classical castrati roles, Armando in Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto, composed in 1824.

When the last of the operatic castrati for whom those two roles were written, Giovani Veluti sang it in London, he got bad reviews, it was the first time in more than two decades that a castrato had appeared in an opera there and musical tastes had changed, drastically.   He continued performing on the continent with better reception and in concert for a number of years after that.   He died about 1860.  With him the golden age of the castrati ended, the recordings of Moreschi not even a shadow of that.

Update:  There is a really odd BBC program about the castrati and a really stupid attempt to "recreate" the voice using computers that proves, if nothing else does, that when a techie puts his hand to something like making a computer sing like a person, the results will be stupid.