Italian Lute Songs (1993)

Derek Lee Ragin (1958) is an American countertenor. Derek Ragin was born in West Point, New York and grew up in Newark, New Jersey. He began his formal voice training with the Newark Boys Chorus, and studied as a piano and music education major at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. While at Oberlin, he also took secondary voice lessons with Richard Anderson, and began his operatic career at Oberlin in Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream as Oberon. After leaving Oberlin, Ragin worked with singer Max van Egmond for a summer session at BPI and went to Europe to pursue his career in Baroque opera. (...) Shortly after his Salzburg performance of Orfeo ed Euridice, he sang the role of Orfeo on the Philips recording of the opera with Sylvia McNair as Euridice and Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir. Farinelli won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Film in 1995, and the soundtrack won the Golden Record award the following year in Cannes.