Dear Lloyd, Caio, Tako, Martti and co vocalisters,
As always, Lloyd is right. But in my own tenoral experience there is a big difference between a well supported and an unsupported or weakly supported (tenor) head voice. It is the support (with vowel modification, for many vowels) that enables the tenor to make the head voice sound like the chest voice, that enables him to sing an even sounding scale from C4 to C5 that is loud enough.
With less support, the head voice sounds much weaker, and different from the rest of the voice at the same volume and this is often mistaken for falsetto. Carreras used/s it a lot, and so did Richard Tauber. Many tenors use it to mark notes, because it is an easy and non fatigueing way to sing higher notes.
To Tako: Why would a tenor that has a register (head voice) with which he can do everything in a sublime way, use falsetto?
To Caio: As I understand from Miller's book 'Training Tenor Voices', very light high tenors often have problems finding their head voice, because they come such a long way without it, having their 2nd passagio point at a4 flat or even higher and above that use falsetto instead. And if you are really such a high tenor, your high notes wil sound different from the ones you know from most tenors singing high c's.
As for diffculty of the Bach Evangelist recitatives and the tenor arias: Wunderlich just loved to sing both, in the Matthaeus that is. On the next day he would sing an opera, so for a real good tenor, it cannot be too difficult. There are a few highish notes in the recitatives but nothing above a4 of course, and it does not stay high all the time, and there is plenty of time to rest, so I don't see the problem, apart from the fact that singing tenor is never really easy, unless you only sing operetta's.
Best greetings,
Dre
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