He Break Dances. He Pole Dances. He Sings Like an Angel.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/arts/music/jakub-joseph-orlinski-countertenor-poland.html

Version 0 of 1.

LONDON — When foreign stars visit the Glyndebourne opera festival in the countryside outside London, it’s common for them to participate in some time-honored English rituals, like sipping Pimm’s on the lawn or nibbling on a scone for afternoon tea. But when the young Polish countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski arrived to perform the title role in Handel’s “Rinaldo” in 2019, he announced his presence differently: by break dancing on the terrace in front of an audience in ball gowns and tuxedos, as well as a photographer or two.

Judging by Orlinski’s Instagram account — 123,000 followers and counting — this wasn’t an isolated incident. To promote his Metropolitan Opera debut in Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice” last fall, he flexed his breaking skills in Lincoln Center’s plaza, and the company’s publicity team filmed it in slow motion. During a recent stint at the Royal Opera House here, Orlinski posted a picture of himself on that hallowed stage doing a so-called Slav squat (if you’re over 30, Google it) with the hashtag #LetsBarock.

“Dude, these pics are so FIRE,” one commenter wrote.

Sure, Orlinski, 31, has the credits you’d expect for a fast-rising star: a recording deal with Warner, a bustling recital schedule, and appearances at prestigious European opera houses and festivals. But then there’s the taste for hip-hop and streetwear, trumpeted on Instagram, and the branding deals and crossover tracks, including a 2020 collaboration with a trio of Polish rappers and pop stars for Pepsi. Though classical music is diversifying, it’s hard to think of another singer who lists break dancing awards alongside concert prizes on their résumé.

Whatever is going on, it’s clearly working. Last fall, Gramophone magazine put Orlinski on the cover. The headline was “A Countertenor for Our Times.” This month, he will embark on a North American recital tour — traveling from Georgia to the West Coast and ending in Canada — performing a mixture of baroque arias and Polish song.

Over lunch in London last month, there were faint smudges of tiredness under his eyes, but he was fidgety with energy. Orlinski’s chief reason for being in town was “Theodora,” a keenly anticipated debut in a rarely staged piece. Based on the story of an early Christian martyr and a notorious flop for Handel when it debuted in 1750, the oratorio had been retooled for a post-war-on-terror, #MeToo world by the British director Katie Mitchell. Theodora (sung by the American soprano Julia Bullock) was portrayed as freedom fighter plotting to plant a bomb at the embassy of her Roman overlords. When the scheme was foiled, the heroine was held captive in a lap dancing club and sexually assaulted.

Orlinski appeared as the boyish Didymus, a Roman security guard who converts to Theodora’s cause and comes to her rescue. Though he attracted favorable reviews, some audience members seemed a little shocked at a scene in which he exchanged clothes with Bullock, then performed a solo pole dance wearing her spangled dress and platform heels.

“It could have been hilarious, but it wasn’t,” Orlinski said. “People were completely on board.” And he admired the production for its feminist foregrounding of Theodora’s story, he added. “The concept is so good and so well argued,” he said.

Characteristically, Orlinski was also keeping several other plates spinning while in London. One was the debut of a film tied to a forthcoming recording of Vivaldi’s “Stabat Mater.” Somewhere between an art-house short and a high-concept music video, it featured Vivaldi’s score in full, overlaid on scenes resembling a Polish remake of “The Sopranos,” in which Orlinski plays a man bent on revenge after his friends die in a gangland killing.

Another project was a concert at Wigmore Hall alongside the period group Il Pomo d’Oro, with repertoire drawn from another recent disc, this one featuring early 18th-century Italian works. Somewhere amid all this, he was preparing for the American tour.

Was he managing to get any rest? He closed his eyes momentarily. “I am not sleeping much for the last 10 years,” he said.

As a child growing up in Warsaw in the 1990s, a musical career looked unlikely. Though Orlinski’s family is artistic — his father is a graphic designer, his mother an artist — the idea of becoming a professional singer barely crossed his mind, he said. Even though he’d been singing with an amateur, all-male choir since age nine, he mostly spent his time listening to rap, skateboarding and learning parkour.

Unlike England or Germany, Poland has almost no countertenor tradition, in which adult male vocalists sing at altitudes usually reserved for boy altos or mezzo-sopranos. Though pioneering soloists such as James Bowman, David Daniels and Michael Chance helped revive long-forgotten operatic countertenor roles in the 1980s and ’90s — many of them originally written for the castrati who dominated the 18th-century opera stage — the number of professional countertenors remains tiny.

It wasn’t until his choir asked for volunteers to sing the high parts that Orlinski thought of trying it. To his surprise, the register suited him, and he entered Warsaw’s prestigious Fryderyk Chopin University of Music to study voice in 2009.

One of his tutors there, Eytan Pessen, recalled his astonishment at hearing about the new student. “One day, the director of the program told me, ‘There is this strange, beautiful singer, I don’t know if you’ll like him. He’s a break dancer but he also wants to sing countertenor.’ But the voice was absolutely there.”

Even so, Orlinski’s early attempts as a soloist faltered, hampered by a lack of confidence. “I would get 10 people turning up for concerts,” he said. “When I started singing countertenor, four of them would leave.”

After graduating, Orlinski headed to Juilliard, then returned to Europe and began to pick up recital and opera work, making a name for himself in Handel, a composer he reveres.

Despite his ebullient onstage presence, Orlinski has little of the vocal showiness of older countertenors like Philippe Jaroussky or Dominique Visse. Though it’s still developing, his voice is cool and pure in tone.

“The color and timbre are so specific,” Pessen said. “It has this angelic, ethereal quality.”

Orlinski’s breakthrough moment was a husky live performance of Vivaldi’s “Vedro con mio diletto” from the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2017, which was broadcast on Facebook Live by the France Musique radio station then uploaded to YouTube. It has been viewed 8.4 million times — far more than might be expected for an obscure baroque aria.

Later videos advertised Orlinski’s virtuosity: In footage recorded at a Moscow recital last year, he offers a rendition of Purcell’s “Strike the Viol” so decorated with vocal filigree that it practically sounds like bebop.

Bullock, his co-star in “Theodora,” says she admires the freedom Orlinski finds within the structures of period performance. “He’s so inventive with his vocalism,” she said. “There’s this great element of improvisation.”

Orlinski is far from the first classical musician to leverage social media, but, coming from a generation that grew up online, he does it with a charming playfulness and lack of self-importance. A zany video posted for the new year saw him playing the recorder deliberately badly, which generated more than 10,000 likes. For Valentine’s Day, he posed wearing a fitted T-shirt and holding an outsized bunch of flowers. (Judging by the comments beneath, his well-developed biceps are a big part of the appeal.)

His Wigmore Hall recital, in February, was notable for the youth and ardor of its audience. There were three encores, and in the CD-signing line afterward, one woman, a fan from Instagram, was seen clutching a notebook she’d bought on Amazon whose cover read, “Sorry I Wasn’t Listening, I Was Thinking About Jakub Jozef Orlinski.”

“Someone’s really making money off of me,” Orlinski joked.

Building a fan base in this way is still unusual in a classical environment, he conceded, but he was enthusiastic about reaching people who might not have encountered this music before.

Yet Orlinski said there were costs to being so easily accessible to the public. “Some of them are a little weird,” he said. “There are a lot of DMs on Instagram.” Inappropriate messages? He grimaced. “There was a period where it was happening a lot.”

While his concert and opera schedule is booked through 2024, Orlinski said he wasn’t sure where he would go in the longer term. “When I look at the list of things I already did, I’m like, ‘Wow, this is crazy. I’m 31,’” he said. “At the same time, I am just 31.”

Following tradition and available repertoire, most countertenors focus on early music, with occasional forays into contemporary repertoire. But, as with so much else, Orlinski is reluctant to follow the formulas.

The new Polish-themed disc — recorded with a regular collaborator, the pianist Michal Biel, and out in May — features songs by Szymanowski and Mieczyslaw Karlowicz: plush, late-Romantic repertoire most countertenors never go near.

He wasn’t even sure he would remain in classical, or even stay in his current vocal range, he said. “I already talked with my management about that. I told them right away, ‘I am not going to be, like, 60 and still sing as a countertenor.’”

What else would he do? Perhaps run a music festival or make movies, he said, or maybe he’d drop down to baritone range and sing pop. “There are hundreds of open doors.”

Things were moving so fast, he said. “Like with the Met and the Royal Opera House, it was so far away,” he added, with a trace of disbelief. “I knew about those projects in 2018, and it’s already gone.”