Voice: | Countertenor |
Nationality: | |
Year of Birth: | |
Year of Death: |
Radu Marian (Romanian pronunciation: ; born in 1977) is a Moldavian male soprano or sopranist.
He possesses a pure soprano voice in the range of C4 to C6, and he is considered an important singer in Baroque music. His repertoire incorporates cantatas written for soprano by composers like Handel, Bononcini, Carissimi, and Frescobaldi, and the repertoire of the old castrati. He has been called "the Baroque nightingale" by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Marian is an "endocrinological castrato" or "natural castrato". A natural castrato is a male singer who never went through puberty and is able to keep his "unbroken" voice intact.
Marian was born in 1977, in what was then the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, to a family of artists. His talent was first recognized publicly in 1989, at the International Festival of Creation in Moscow, where he took the Laureate prize.
In 1990, at the age of 13, he was awarded first prize at the Extraordinary Talents International Festival in Chisinau. Afterwards, his concert career flourished, and he also continued his singing and piano studies in Moscow and in Bucharest.
He moved to Italy in 1999. In Rome, he studied with conductor and composer Flavio Colusso, and with Colusso he performed the unabridged operas of Giacomo Carissimi throughout Europe. In 2000 he recorded his first album, Alia Vox.