Terry Barber is living every Queen-lovin’ man’s dream because he can, and you can’t. You know who you are. There was that one karaoke night at the pub with your friends back in university. It came to be your turn. You thought you could surely manage Somebody to Love because it’s such a rousing crowd-pleaser.
You were so very wrong, and your voice cracked right at the crucial point, making the triumphant sound like a car accident and not even the audience survived. Song ruined, you left with your head down in disgrace. It’s only because you’re not a countertenor like Freddie was. The lesson you must have learned that night was that if you don’t have the voice then it’s really best for everyone to leave the song well enough alone.
Thankfully, Terry Barber has the voice. The multi-talented American musical artist can vocally tackle practically any genre from classical opera to musical theatre to contemporary pop, but he’s bringing his tribute to Freddie Mercury to the Arden stage this Saturday.
“I've got a couple of different versions of this show and of this material that I've been working with. Pretty much because I'm a countertenor — because it's the rarest voice type, and people don't really know what it is — people have been asking me to think about the music of Freddie Mercury… for pretty much my entire career,” he began.
The singer started out as a boy soprano, and when his voice changed, he was able to get more of those groovy low notes even though he kept a similar range in his upper voice.
“I was always using this high part of my range, and because people recognized that I had an extreme range, I think that was the reason that they kept saying, ‘Well, what do you think about the music of Freddie Mercury?’” he continued.
“I'd always been a fan of Queen and I knew the greatest hits album, like growing up backward and forward. Freddie actually died when I was a young person, so I didn't know too much about him, but I was a big fan of the music of Queen. I never really thought of myself as a rock singer.”
Regardless, he has a killer homage to the king of Queen. Careful to note that he’s not doing an impersonation, Barber will belt out a bevy of some of the greatest and most difficult-to-emulate rock tunes ever. It might just be the best test of the durability of the Arden's brick walls, as some of the most powerful audio waves bounce off of them.
Barber describes his voice and his career.
“When I explain it to the audience, I usually joke with them and say, ‘when they told you in school, that tenor was the highest voice range for men, they lied. Countertenors really comfortably sing in the range above that. We have countertenors, who in the classical world, are really contraltos or mezzo sopranos or even sopranos. That’s how my career began: in the classical world.”
That world offered him the training and the vocal tools to sing Andrew Lloyd Webber as much as Freddie Mercury, or anything else, pretty much.
When he works with young singers, he always tells them, "It doesn't matter what part of the arts you want to be in, if you start with classical — whether you're a dancer, or a painter, or an actor, or an instrumentalist, or a singer — you really have to have a good tool set to work with. That will give you a place to start from. You can decide from there what genre you want to be in.' That's how I found my way to doing recordings in every genre. Well," he paused, "not every genre, I guess. I haven't done rap or country yet."
Terry Barber presents the music of Freddie Mercury at the Arden Theatre starting at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 5 at the Arden Theatre. Tickets are $36 (before taxes and fees) and are available through the Arden box office at 780-459-1542 or at stalbert.ca/exp/arden/tickets-box-office.
Visit ardentheatre.com to learn how public-health measures might affect the show.
