It was not the custom’s barbarity but the advent of a new breed of macho tenors that ended the castrato craze in the 19th century.The last castrato – Alessandro Moreschi, known as the Angel of Rome – died in 1922, leaving 17 recordings. He’s doing some of their arias, and also the vocal exercises they had to spend hours every day perfecting. “The basic requirements were the same as they are now,” he says. “To know how to breathe, to pronounce words clearly, to sing legato, and to produce the messa di voce, which is the hardest thing you ever have to do as a singer.” He demonstrates: a slow crescendo followed by a slow diminuendo, without a hint of any change in the vibrato-speed.But while Farinelli famously bested a trumpeter in range and purity of tone, he was a wooden actor: one critic likened him to a calf roused from its slumber in St James’s Park by the dainty foot of a milkmaid.Some of the greatest music ever composed was for castrati, and despite the hostility of the Orthodox and Spanish churches, in Italy thousands of young hopefuls queued to be cut up every year, as Pope Clement VIII put it, “to the honour of God”. Accepting the invitation, Farinelli spent the next seven years serenading that gloomy monarch every night.To complement his exhibition’s paintings and instruments of mutilation, Clapton is also singing, to give some idea of what castrato art was all about. So powerful was the spell, combining masculine presence with feminine grace, that even his rivals were bewitched: sharing the stage with him, the equally famous Senesino forgot his fictional character and embraced Farinelli in adoration.The strangest episode in Farinelli’s career came when he was invited by Queen Elizabeth Farnese of Spain to sing to her chronically depressed husband Philip V. As Hogarth recorded in his Rake’s Progress, one society lady memorably sighed “One God, one Farinelli”, when that singer wove his spell.

The ribs kept growing, too, so the lungs expanded to fill the chest cavity, and could take in more air. “This all meant,” says Clapton, “that a castrato could seem to sing for ever.”In Handel’s London, the castrati were treated like pop stars, and they amassed commensurate wealth. And with this soft and flexible apparatus, the singer could perform exceptional vocal acrobatics. “We can see from his scores,” says Clapton, “that the things Farinelli could do were jaw-dropping. I recently worked out that well over a thousand notes a minute were sometimes going past his larynx.”Another effect of there being no testosterone in the male body in adolescence was that the joints between the bones didn’t harden, so the bones kept growing.

Among the exhibits at the Handel House Museum are two rusty “castratori” – these being the instruments used to dig the testes out.
One anatomical effect of pre-pubertal castration was to prevent the larynx from growing: the castrato’s vocal cords were thus smaller and finer-textured than those of an adult male – more like a female soprano’s, in fact. In 17th-century Europe, though the penis was left intact, castration of eight-year-old boy singers was still a violent business, with the patient being plunged into a bath of milk to soften the genital area, then drugged by alcohol or opium (which often killed them), or by half-strangulation through pressure on the jugular vein. Castration was first recorded in the Chinese imperial court in 1765BC, when the genitals were removed totally. And as curator of an exhibition entitled Handel and the Castrati, which has just opened at the Handel House Museum in London, he’s determined to bring these monstres sacr?into focus for the first time as people, rather as a historical freak-show. “Mention the word castrato to any male music lover,” says Nicholas Clapton, “and he’ll go green about the gills, because the idea is a terrible threat to his sexual identity.” As a counter-tenor who has twice impersonated Farinelli, the most famous castrato of them all, Clapton is in a position to know. Gene Pitney, the American singer whose reputation rested on a handful of some of the most enduring songs in popular music performed in his unique melodramatic style, was found dead in his hotel room in Cardiff yesterday morning He was 65.. He was always more celebrated in Britain than in his home country, so it was probably appropriate that he died in the middle of yet another sell-out tour of this country, only hours after performing to a packed hall of adoring fans.

This raises very important questions about the pre-clinical testing of products of this kind.”. All are improving, according to the hospital.Professor Kent Woods, the chief executive of the MHRA, which carried out the inquiry, said: “There was a powerful pharmacological action of this drug in man that was not detectable in tests on non-human primates at far higher doses. Three weeks later one remains in hospital and the other five have been discharged. The tests were run by a US-based company Parexel.The six volunteers, all men aged 19 to 40, were taken to Northwick Park Hospital within hours of the start of the trial on 13 March. Experts said that they feared the impact on the future of drug testing.Professor Geoff Hale of the Therapeutic Antibody Centre at Oxford University, said: “I am worried that this will make it even more difficult for hospitals and charities and academics – the non-commercial sector – to do drug development.”TG1412, made by the German company TeGenero, was being developed as a treatment for immune disorders such as leukaemia, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.Although it was given to the six human volunteers in a dose 500 times lower than that previously used on monkeys without ill effects, the drug triggered a life-threatening immune response in the volunteers. The MHRA announced a review of drug testing and said that no further trials of novel compounds targeted at the immune system would be authorised without external advice from experts.The conclusion means that despite the stringent safety measures already in place which require new drugs to be tested in the laboratory, on human tissues and in animals for several years, they can still produce powerful effects in humans that cannot be predicted. He said: “It is only right that an independent group is established to scrutinise the decisions which gave rise to the original clinical trial authorisation.”The interim inquiry findings will cast a pall over the development and testing of all drugs with a novel biological action in the UK.

All six experienced severe reactions within minutes of taking the drug including fever, swelling and vomiting.
The inquiry by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which is responsible for drug safety in Britain, found there was no human error involved in the manufacture, preparation or dose of the drug.The solicitor for the two most seriously affected victims dismissed the findings last night as “totally inadequate and accused the MHRA of a “lack of transparency.” Ann Alexander said the authority had failed to give details of the pre-clinical trials, about which there was conflicting information, and had failed to publish the protocol for the trial.The shadow Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, criticised the way the MHRA was “scrutinising its own actions”. The world of medical research has been thrown into chaos after an inquiry into a drug trial that went wrong concluded the problems had occurred because of an unexpected pharmacological reaction in humans. The trial of the drug, TG1412, carried out in a private testing facility at Northwick Park hospital, London, last month, left six human volunteers in intensive care fighting for their lives. I would say in some shape or form when we have got enough information on there and if anybody thought that would have an effect, then yes.”The Fat Duck – which has only 14 covers – received its best restaurant in the world accolade from Restaurant magazine last year.. The archive will allow him to log on and check progress in his kitchen at the end of the day, a facility which may become more important as his profile rises.This summer the BBC is to broadcast Blumenthal’s first prime-time television series, Perfection, a search for the perfect way to cook eight ordinary dishes.Asked if he intended to leave the collection to the nation, perhaps to an institution such as the British Library, he said: “Yes. they were trying to log information, because you are involved in something that is changing the face of gastronomy.”Owing to his commitments running the Fat Duck and his other venture in Bray, the Hind’s Head pub, Blumenthal can spend only a few hours in his laboratory, usually on Monday and Tuesday mornings.