Choirboy using helium (from classicfm.com)

How do you get over the problem of your boy sopranos’ voices breaking? A massive helium balloon, of course. Here’s how it sounds in Allegri’s Miserere...

Choirboys have a pretty tough life. 

For years, they’ve been praised and admired for their beautifully angelic high Cs – but then puberty  comes and...no more high Cs

Luckily, The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge has found a solution for this inconvenience. 

Instead of hiring a soprano to hit the top notes, they’ve discovered that a nice big balloon of helium does the job just as well.

In this stunning performance of Allegri’s ‘Miserere’, a male university student is able to hit a C6 (a soprano C, to you and me) simply by inhaling a gulp of helium from a giant balloon.

Allegri’s ‘Miserere’ was famously transcribed and brought into the public domain by Mozart in 1770. 

The young composer, then aged just 14, supposedly once heard the piece at a concert, returned home and wrote down the whole thing note for note.

In all seriousness, this video was actually filmed as an April Fool’s prank in 2014.

 

COMPLETE:

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