I enjoyed listening to the first act of Tristan this afternoon. It's very interesting to hear a version that is widely available in the shops, for some reason. I'm not a big fan of John Treleavan's voice but he seems to have a strong presence on stage and something of that comes through in recordings.

As I've started this thread, I feel I am allowed to digress a little and raise the old question of the shortage of tenors. I don't mean helden tenors necessarily but I was thinking more of regional choirs. Some of us were discussing this in the pub last week as I was being pressured to join a choir. I joined one choir just to sing Karl Jenkins' Armed Man as a special favour and a one-off recently but I just find all the weeks of rehearsal and "note bashing" incredibly boring.

But is there really a shortage or is that many men cannot be bothered to try getting that high or tackle what can sometimes be a more difficult, inner line? The reason I have my doubts is that if you listen to any man singing a pop song from the last 40 years it's nearly always high. Football crowds sing high up too. I know that it's largely because they're yelling, shouting even, so it's not proper singing. But I think that nature spreads her gifts around evenly so I suspect that there are reasons for this perceived shortage that are not natural.

i don't know if this has any scientific proof to back it up, but shouldn't the dominant voice of a region be dependent on the climate? i.e.

russia = cold therefore lots of basso profundo?
italy = warm therefore lots of tenors?

of course counter-tenors have to muck that theory up, but then we are a special bunch! 

Heard most of Act II this afternoon and was distinctly underwhelmed. Isolde was by far the best of the bunch; Tristan seemed unable to hold a note without wow and flutter; Mark was lugubrious - maybe he has reason to be, but this was deadly dull; Melot's upsurge at the end could easily, one felt, have been countered by a Tristan with half a hand on his sword. And the orchestral playing was lacklustre - poorly articulated and monochrome.

BUT!!! It is still a wonderful score and hearing it again for the first time in more than twelve months brought it all back to me, making me realise again why for so many in the C19th it was such a massively important piece.

A quick sketch - I know!!! 

Weird thing is that it really DOES fly by in performance - what a master of pacing! (Like Act 1 of Walkure or Act 2 of Parsifal.)

In a funny sort of way, it relates to what you were saying yesterday about the end of Wozzeck (and indeed the end of each act of Wozzeck) - the pacing and placing of events before is done in such a masterly way that one is left listening well into the silence beyond the double bar.

Hmm, not a very elegant way of putting it, but hopefully you get my drift.

I love that almost mechanised feeling at the end of Wozzeck, almost as if we have seen puppets, ciphers, that this is Everyman's story, it could happen to any of us. What a genius.

Eh?  I don't follow your reasoning.

Although it's not universally true (for example, I've just done a show with a "Rossinian" high-set tenor who is 2m tall) I think the physical size of the body is also influential in determining what voice comes out of it.  Tenors tend to be little short blokes,  and basses tend to be of the XXL size.  You look at the famous basso profondo singers, and they're all built like that proverbial privy made of bricks.  That physique is maybe more frequently found in Russia and Scandinavia than in Southern/Western Europe?

I know one singing teacher who firmly believes that it's related to diet - we eat better (or at least, we eat"more") now than our forebears of 500 years ago.  Something which sticks in my mind from an excursion around the HMS Victory many years ago was the low ceilings - "because", we were told, "the average male height in Nelson's day was around 5'2" ". 

Maybe this plays a part in things?

On the question of voice registers, and judging mainly by the kids who audition for musicals, it's stuck me over the past 15 years or so that there are more and more whose voices are high: whole tranches of them can now reach top Cs and Ds with ease, most of them with pleasant enough natural voices, though I'm not a big fan of the present "West End" sound which most of them adopt.

 I avoid Karaoke like the plague, but on the odd occasion when it seems I'll not be able to escape I'm usually eventually spared simply because none of the material is in a singable key for me - it's all way too high, often higher than the original release its based on. Most of the chart stuff I hear nowadays is also in noticeably higher keys than the majority of sixties and seventies material, let alone anything from the fifties; the average radio speaking voice seems to be higher in range, too; there are far fewer of the 'dark brown' voices of yesteryear: I'd hazard a guess that in the UK the average voice pitch has risen by a couple of tones over the last forty years or so, and that home-grown basses (and bass-baritones) will be in increasingly short supply.

I'm not quite sure what Ron means by the West End sound but it seems to me that most modern musicals are sung by tenors and female altos. If there's a duet, the man will often sing at the same pitch as the woman.

And no one has mentioned yet that children are growing up more quickly now and so boys' voices are breaking sooner. That is probably the result of better diet but I wonder whether there are psychological pressures to mature more quickly these days.