Russell Oberlin obituary

Two countertenors, one British, one American, were at the centre of the early music movement as it gathered momentum in the middle of the 20th century: Alfred Deller and Russell Oberlin. While Deller was firmly rooted in the Anglican choral tradition, the voice and stylistic address of the Ohio-born Oberlin, who has died at the age of 88, were conspicuously more secular – early professional assignments included the advertising of a brand of toilet paper.

Eschewing falsetto, Oberlin’s tone, seamless through a range of over two octaves, had a more incisive quality than Deller’s pure sound, though he arguably lacked the expressive mastery of the greatest of the legions of countertenors that followed him on both sides of the Atlantic.

To his admirers, such as Joel Cohen, former director of the Boston Camerata, his androgynous voice wafted “as though an angel were singing from on high, in some celestial tongue unknown to man”. In the high range the tone could indeed be ethereal; in the lower register it was darker and more complex, slightly threatening, and the tone could harden unattractively under pressure.

Oberlin was a leading light in Noah Greenberg’s New York Pro Musica Antiqua, founded in 1952 to resurrect, in a scholarly fashion, the repertoire of the middle ages, Renaissance and early baroque periods. The success of its landmark 1958 production of the medieval liturgical drama The Play of Daniel, which opened at the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was due in no small part to Oberlin. For him Greenberg created the role of Belshazzar’s Prince, the son of the biblical Babylonian king who asks his Jewish adviser, Daniel, to interpret the words he sees a hand writing on a wall.

The tacit rivalry between Oberlin and Deller continued when Covent Garden invited Oberlin to play Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in its new production of 1961 – he also took the role in the North American premiere in Vancouver and in the US premiere in San Francisco the same year. The part had been written for Deller and first performed by him in Aldeburgh the previous summer: he was deeply offended by the slight. Rumour had it, however, that in overstretching his instrument in the role, Oberlin shortened his career. Certainly it came to a premature end when he retired from the platform, after a period of ill-health, in 1966 at the age of 38.

He turned to teaching, appearing as lecturer and lecture-recitalist at colleges and universities throughout the US and abroad. In 1971 he was appointed professor of music at Hunter College at the City University of New York, and director of the Hunter College Vocal Collegium.

A native of Akron, Ohio, the son of John, a tyre examiner for Firestone, and his wife, Ethel (nee Keys), Oberlin showed early promise as a treble in his local church choir and was soon performing throughout the state. His talents were exploited on the radio, where he provided vocals for jingles advertising such products as flour and Seminole toilet paper. At this time, too, he won the Major Bowes Amateur Hour, a nationwide radio talent competition, with his rendering of Until, a sentimental ballad by the English organist and composer Wilfrid Sanderson.

He received his vocal education at the Juilliard School of Music, New York, where his teachers included the baritone Evan Evans, graduating with a diploma in 1951. At this stage he was a tenor but, encouraged by Greenberg, he switched to countertenor. As he explained to a newspaper in 1961: “I simply found that the more I sang the higher parts the easier they became. I can sing falsetto, but I really can’t go much higher that way than I can otherwise, and the quality is not the same.”

With Pro Musica he performed at home and abroad on the group’s tours, which included appearances at various European cathedrals (1960), summer festivals (1963) and in the USSR (1964). He also sang as a countertenor with opera companies, orchestras and ensembles and in theatrical productions. On Broadway he performed incidental music by Leonard Bernstein for Jean Anouilh’s drama The Lark (1955) and by Lee Hoiby for John Webster’s tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (1957).

His first recordings were a series of 10 discs of mostly medieval music (1957-60) for the company known as Expériences Anonymes, which later became the Lyrichord label. For Lyrichord he also made the first LP devoted to the 13th-century Cantigas de Santa Maria (1994). Further recordings featured the music of Purcell, Bach (including ones made with Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould), Handel and Schumann.

These recordings, as well as his short-lived stage career, helped to establish the countertenor voice as a suitable vehicle for music of the early period. But he also provided, with the highly individual calibre of his instrument, an alternative to the Anglican “hoot”, which some found precious, and to the falsetto vocal production ubiquitous in Britain and elsewhere. Allegiance to one or the other voice type remains a matter of taste, but it was a differentiation that was to lead to a far greater variety of timbre among countertenor voices in the decades to come.

He is survived by his sister, Jean.