Daria Wilke - HYACINTH VOICES

Hidden away at Settecento, the shady 'Tsar' runs a modern-day boarding school modelled on Baroque-era music academies. Here, highly gifted boys are trained – and castrated – to enable them to sing the most spectacular roles, like the castrati of Baroque music. When Timo, a young boy with a magical voice, flees to Vienna and his mentor Matteo sets off in search of him, the music world is forced to confront reality. Matteo becomes a street singer and is both the hunter and the hunted. The Tsar is on his tracks and, in order to find Timo, he has to hold his own in the tough world of the homeless. Imbued with the sounds of Baroque opera, Daria Wilke's breathtaking story tells of a secret society that is prepared to pay any price for beauty.