Shortly after Jakub Józef Orliński, a young Polish countertenor, made his début at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, in a 2017 production of Cavalli’s “Erismena,” he was celebrating with several other singers when he got a phone call from one of the event’s organizers. An ensemble scheduled to appear the next day on a live broadcast of “Carrefour de Lodéon,” a French radio program, had dropped out. Would Orliński jump in and perform? Orliński, who was twenty-six at the time, was in high spirits, having played the role of Orimeno with goofy, irrepressible energy. He’d made his first entrance by leaping onto a chair, launching into a jaunty aria, and then—exhibiting a skill singular among opera singers—throwing himself into a sequence of break-dancing power moves. Orliński said into the phone, “Of course I am going to sing! I am a singer. I love to sing!”

He awoke the next morning with something of a hangover. Usually when he was asked to perform a solo he chose a fiery coloratura piece such as “Furibondo spira il vento,” from “Partenope,” or “A dispetto d’un volto ingrato,” from “Tamerlano”—Handel compositions that invite the singer to show off his flexibility and range at daring speed. Under the circumstances, however, Orliński selected something more languid: “Vedrò con mio diletto,” an aria from Vivaldi’s 1724 opera “Il Giustino.” Orliński put on baggy shorts and beat-up sneakers, and rolled up the sleeves of a crumpled tattersall shirt: this was radio, after all, and it was ninety degrees outside. Only when he and his pianist, Alphonse Cémin, who was in shorts and flip-flops, arrived at the recording venue—a courtyard with a small audience—did they learn that the performance was also to be streamed on Facebook Live. It was too late for Orliński to change clothes, and so he sang just as he was—unshaved, and dressed as if ready for a day of sleeping it off under the Provençal plane trees.

The video of that performance has since been viewed three and a half million times on YouTube, the clarity and sensuality of Orliński’s vocals only heightened by his grungy appearance. Vivaldi’s aria, a recital favorite among countertenors, showcases a singer’s emotional expressiveness and vocal virtuosity. In Orliński’s swooning rendering, purity combined with sultriness. The countertenor voice is arresting and otherworldly, dwelling in a range typically associated with a feminine voice, yet deployed by a man. This provocative juxtaposition was readily evident in the video; its viral spread was assisted by the fact that Orliński’s good looks—an athletic physique, a square jaw, abundant curls, and striking blue eyes—are as uncommonly pleasing as his voice. The consensus among the video’s two and a half thousand commenters was that, if Michelangelo’s statue of David were to come to life, he would look and sound like Orliński.

In the two years since his performance in the courtyard in Aix, Orliński has joined the small but growing ranks of star countertenors, participating in an ongoing revival of Baroque music, both sacred and operatic. He has sung at the prestigious Oper Frankfurt; at Wigmore Hall, in London, a venue that specializes in solo recitals; and at Weill Recital Hall, the upstairs venue at Carnegie Hall. His voice is a rich alto rather than a vertiginous soprano, with a resonant warmth and an absence of shrillness. (In a review that appeared in this magazine, Alex Ross compared the timbre of Orliński’s voice to a clarinet.) Orliński’s performances have an exceptional musicality. Works from the Baroque period were written in such a way that, within established conventions, a singer has room to make the piece his or her own through ornamentation—flourishes that are not marked in the score. Orliński, who wrote a master’s thesis at Fryderyk Chopin University, in Warsaw, on styles of Baroque ornamentation, knows the rules inside out, and he exhibits creativity in his choices: when performing Handel, he’ll switch up the accents in “Furibondo spira il vento” to give certain passages a jazzy syncopation, or begin the highest note in “A dispetto d’un volto ingrato” half a bar early, so that his voice is heard before the orchestra weighs in. A giddy review in OperaWire likened Orliński’s vocal phrasings to “Petrarchian poetry,” praising his “fabulously even runs,” “sparkling trilling,” “perceptive word coloring,” and “masterful melismatic technique.”

Orliński’s effervescent, zany manner is well suited to the contrived plots that are commonplace in Baroque operas. (If you cannot really follow the story of “Erismena,” you can at least enjoy the ebullient charm of its characters.) Orliński, who started break-dancing in his teens, belongs to a prize-winning group, in his home town of Warsaw, called the Skill Fanatikz Crew, where he was known for combining moves in inventive ways, and for his joyful charisma on the floor. Lately, his competitive-dance career has been somewhat sidelined by his singing schedule, but on YouTube he can be seen on the roofs of buildings in Warsaw, leaping into handstands, spinning upside down, and unabashedly adopting the streetwise posturing of a Beastie Boy. Orliński is not infrequently called on by opera directors to bust some moves, and though certain tricks are not recommended onstage—headstands cause the neck muscles to tense, which is unhelpful for a singer—he incorporates others into his warmup routine, including moves on the floor that stretch his back, lengthening the muscles between his ribs, and handstands, which allow gravity to do the work of lifting his soft palate. (A raised palate produces a less nasal tone.) Even when Orliński is not executing windmills or performing other acrobatic feats in opera productions, he displays a muscular hypermasculinity that offers a piquant counterpoint to the ethereal quality of his voice.

Orliński has extended his appeal to younger audiences through social media: he is fluent in English, and often posts daily on Instagram, where more than thirty-four thousand followers watch him narrate his travels (“It’s so beautiful today in Paris!”) and take in touristy street shots that he has augmented with animated waddling ducks. He communicates directly with his fans on Facebook, where he recently posted a slickly produced seven-minute documentary in which he explains the intersection between break dancing and operatic singing, saying, “Break dance allowed me to understand how my body works—taught me the discipline, and helped me to find the balance.” The camera followed him backstage at the Bockenheimer Depot, in Frankfurt, during a production of Handel’s “Rinaldo” in which he played the lead role. Before a performance, he can be seen daubing his torso with white body paint; afterward, he is seen showering it off.

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The singers who performed in operatic works by Handel or Vivaldi in the eighteenth century were the musical celebrities of their day, and Orliński’s approach is to gleefully inhabit that space of stardom, rather than to handle the repertoire as if he were a reverent museum curator. “I treat Baroque music as, basically, pop music, but in their time,” he told me when I met him, earlier this spring. “I feel like Justin Timberlake sometimes. I feel fresh, and I feel kind of entertained by performing, and I want to have fun. I don’t want it to be kind of stiff—‘I’m going to sing some classical music and be serious right now.’ ” Orliński, who worked as a model in Warsaw before becoming a professional singer, has been featured not only in classical-music publications but also in high-fashion magazines, including Polish Vogue and Citizen K, the French publication, which recently put him on the cover of its men’s edition wearing a powdered gray wig and a ruffled floral shirt. His own musical tastes are eclectic: lately, in addition to opera he’s been listening to Lukas Graham, the Danish pop band, and such nineties hip-hop groups as Jurassic 5 and Hilltop Hoods. The audiences who attend his concerts, many of whom are younger than is typical for classical music, sometimes respond beyond the usual boundaries of concert-hall propriety. “Vedrò con mio diletto” has become his final, crowd-pleasing encore, and when he coyly introduced it in February, at the new Zaryadye Hall, in Moscow—“Here’s a very unknown piece by Vivaldi”—audience members cheered and held their iPhones aloft, like fans at a rock concert welcoming their favorite hit. Orliński has the accomplished performer’s art of making the practiced appear to be spontaneous, and, dressed in a slim Hugo Boss suit, he nonetheless captured in Moscow some of the casual intimacy of his shorts-and-sneakers performance in Aix. Just before the violinists began to ply their bows for the first bars of the piece, Orliński reached a hand up to loosen the single button on his jacket, so that it fell open—the suggestive gesture of a lounge singer.