You're a young boy living in poverty, and your parents don't know how they're going to keep you fed. If you're growing up in the Dominican Republic in 2009, they may pray that a baseball scout will ...

Long before botched plastic surgery ruined a movie star’s career, they were the original showbiz victims. Castrati were young opera singers in past centuries castrated to preserve a high-pitched voice ...

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Cecilia Bartoli could have followed the path of least resistance. When the Italian mezzo-soprano burst onto the opera scene in the early '90s with a standard repertoire of ...

For a solid portion of musical history, castrato singers or ‘castrati’ had a prominent role in operas, churches and courts across Europe. But why were young boys forced to undergo the gruesome ...

1562 The Sistine Chapel choir accepts its first castrato member. 1607 Claudio Monteverdi writes Orfeo, the first major opera, with several roles for castrati. 1737 Farinelli, the most celebrated of ...

Everyone knows what a toll the rock-star lifestyle can exact. Drugs and alcohol are de rigueur, sexual promiscuity often comes with the territory, and loss of hearing is yet another occupational ...

Over 250 years after Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice presented opera in a new way, an acrobatic staging aims to do the same. Iestyn Davies, whose Orpheus will be amid the tumblers, dancers and acrobats, ...