The most remarkable characteristics of Mirco Palazzi’s singing are elegance and style. Despite his young age, this Italian bass has already gained international acclaim thanks to his wide-ranging vocal ability, musical sensitivity and versatile talent as an actor.

With the release of this, Palazzi’s most recent recording produced by Bongiovanni, it won’t take long for listener’s to understand why this young bass has already garnered such critical praise in the opera world.  The artist has played some of the best cards in his repertoire, in a program that embraces styles from Italian Opera to American Song.

The most striking features of Palazzi’s voice, upon first listening, are the color, the beauty of a rich and warm timbre, the fullness of sound from low to high registers, the consistency of projection both in legato and coloratura passages, which are  particularly difficult given the general heaviness of the bass voice; this can be seen most evidently in Sì, tra i ceppi e le ritorte, which Palazzi executes with extreme precision, while never succumbing to the all-too-often abused tricks of aspirate vowels (preceding all vowel sounds with an audible “h” sound).

Thanks to his mastery of breath support, Palazzi is able to harness great expression in his use of line. He crafts his phrases in reference to both music and text, using lines both long and legato as well as short and excited, sometimes side by side. This dynamic variation serves to create a skillful game of vocal and dramatic contrast. The solemnly paternal incipit of Mentre ti lascio, o figlia is followed by a intermediary section in which the sorrow for the bitter departure of Dario’s daughter and the anguish that it brings are rendered by means of a languid and subdued tone, plaintive on the interjection ‘Ahi’, which comes to its climax on the final repitions of ‘le smanie ed il terror’.

Mirco Palazzi during the recording of Rossini's Zelmira

Such dynamic transitions represent the notable stylistic attributes of Palazzi’s singing,
as in the recitative Sì, vi sarà vendetta, followed by Deh, ti ferma! Deh, ti placa, in which the fiery accents on ‘a vendicarvi io volo’ and ‘tremi Arsace’ are balanced by the intimate and hallucinate whispers of ‘folle, deliro’, finally culminating in the pianissimo of ‘Oh Dio’, rendered with the same passion and mystic ardor which can be heard in the words ‘prega Maria per me’ at the end of Il lacerato spirto.
It is within the same Verdian aria that Palazzi, as Jacopo Fiesco, shows how his research for effects aimed to emphasize the text or the dramaturgical context is always informed by the principle of cantability, as in one of the aria’s most significant passages ‘il serto a lei dei martiri’.

Our listening experience continues with the French Devant la maison, a strophic aria in which the artist must balance both the work’s complex structure and its dangerous tendency towards strophic monotony.  Palazzi deftly manages these challenges while retaining the ability to treat each strophe as a unique textual and musical entity.

His fluent French allows him to explore nuances of both color and timbre, as is evident in Ravel’s triptych, Don Quichotte Doulcinèe, in which Palazzi, despite the contrasting character of each piece, has managed to catch the underlying unity of the composition – in other words, the internal dialectic that rejoins the three frames into a single, variegated landscape of sound.

Palazzi’s familiarity and knowledge of the American repertoire, specifically musical theatre, also comes as a pleasant surprise. Unjustly snubbed by Italian opera singers, Broadway’s immense number of productions boast real melodic gems - virtuoso pieces that are often no less demanding than operatic arias - among these, Old Man River stands
out for its extreme musical and emotional range. Palazzi’s interpretation is convincing from a linguistic point of view and impressive from a vocal standpoint, for the depth of the lower register in the exposition as well as the boldness of the successive high E naturals in the explosive finale. One must say that the whole performance is not less impressive than those of the most famous American basses and baritones: Robeson, Ramey, Hines, Tibbet, Thomas and Warfield, those who Palazzi pays homage too here.

Mirco Palazzi's solo cd cover

Palazzi’s vocal and linguistic versatility is particularly evident in Schubert’s Il Modo di Prender Moglie, a piece of musical whim and coquetry. Here the singer reveals an irresistible comic verve which relies on his ability to infuse each word with its own particular color and depth, all the while avoiding the trend toward overacting tasteless witticisms. Likewise in the conclusion of Tosti’s L’ultima canzone, Palazzi resists the temptation of getting carried away and ‘barking’ on the word ‘menta’ – a habit formed by so many after the famous rendition of Gigli - concluding the phrase with sweetness and sensuality.

Finally, a separate mention should be reserved for the low-register vanishing into a wonderfully subtle pianissimo, as in the word ‘Addio’ in Donizetti’s waltz Addio Brunetta or in the last melancholic repetition of the verse Non t’amo più in Tosti’s song of the same name, where on the final ‘più’, an unexpected but powerful vocal crescendo reaffirms, once again, Palazzi’s extraordinary artistic sensibility.