Over My Head

Has there ever been a countertenor praised by the LA Times as ‘one of the finest of his generation’ who has also been a finalist on TV talent show The Voice? American singer John Holiday has been defying categorisation since the beginning, packing the release of pop singles alongside concerts of gospel and jazz and leading roles at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Komische Oper and the Met into a busy last decade. Now he releases his classical debut, and it’s exactly the singular recording you’d expect.

There’s not a Purcell song or a Handel aria in sight in a voice-and-piano recital (Holiday is joined by the outstanding, Grammy-nominated pianist Kevin Miller) subtitled ‘Love in the key of resilience’. The album represents a personal selection of 20th- and 21st-century works that both champion ‘black excellence’ and reflect Holiday’s own biographical experience and stylistic breadth.

Holiday’s voice is a thrilling one: bags of power right across a wide range, androgynous but not in an asexual way, rather trying on masculine and feminine colours for size. It’s interesting to hear him deploy it to different ends here, now lean and fiercely bright in Theo Morrison’s ‘I hear an army charging upon the land’, now luscious and velvet-soft in H Leslie Adams’s gospel ‘Prayer’, Johnson Hall’s ‘I’m gonter tell God all o’ my troubles’ and his own arrangement of ‘Amazing grace’ and ‘Over my head’, vibrato spinning gently and freely.

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that the further the repertoire gets from the classical tradition the better Holiday sings. His gospel or jazz sound is noticeably freer and rounder right up to the top of the voice – just listen to his delicious unaccompanied opening to Robert L Morris’s ‘Gospel Blues’, then compare it to the tighter, more consciously worked and projected sound in the Morrison songs and Carlos Simon’s three Vocalises.

Advocacy and excellence don’t always go hand in hand. The quality of the repertoire here is decidedly mixed, and while we get exciting discoveries like Morris’s Lyric Suite – gospel and jazz polished to a high concert-hall shine, Kevin Miller taking full advantage of his idiomatic, joyful writing – there are too many weaker works. Holiday is an artist determined to plough his own furrow, but it’s hard not to want to hear his flexible, exciting instrument meet its match in some core countertenor classics.