Fresh off a win in Australia's Got Talent, 15-year-old (yes, 15-year-old)
Mark Vincent took his operatic skills to a full album. With sales driven at least in part by the spectacle of his rise to fame, the album found its way onto the ARIA charts quickly after release. Beyond the gimmick of a young virtuoso, though, the surprising part here is that
Vincent has serious vocal abilities. The opening Nessun Dorma is a somewhat clichéd choice for opera to deliver to a mass audience, but he performs it well. As he moves through the album, the mix becomes a little more hit or miss.
Vincent specializes in straightforward, stereotypical operatic forms -- long notes, grandiose deliveries. In some cases the delivery of simpler English lyrics proves a downfall. The spoken portions of
Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" provide the first glimpse of this problem -- the brevity of the lyrics seems forced and the operatic enunciation sounds stiff (and that becomes more obvious in a stray
Sinatra song soon after), but a transition to longer choruses and a midsong switch to Italian suddenly show
Vincent back in form. This is the case throughout the album -- when he sticks to more classical (or classical crossover) fare,
Vincent shines, with a gorgeous voice and very good deliveries. When he moves into more contemporary fare, the sound falls apart under the weight of his operatic grandiosity. He could have stayed safer and stuck with more opera, but he took risks instead. The majority of those risks failed to pay off, but the album as a whole shows some incredible promise. ~ Adam Greenberg