One of the rarest voices in the world of opera is now in Australia and its owner, Venezuelan-born Samuel Mariño, is set to charm audiences with his crystal pure natural soprano – and his four suitcases of frothy tulle, slinky sequins and towering heels.

As a male soprano, aka a sopranist, Mariño does not sing falsetto, a technique employed by countertenors to sing the roles originally written for castrati in the baroque and classical repertoire.

“I like to describe my voice as a light lyric soprano, with a bit of coloratura,” he says, speaking to the Guardian after a day’s rehearsal with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra in Sydney earlier this week.

“If I sing falsetto, I sound like Mariah Carey. Or Prince.”

Mariño’s speaking voice has a pleasing soft tinkle to it. A boyish smile never leaves his face.

His buoyant, joyous personality, says Brandenburg’s co-founder and artistic director Paul Dyer, radiates from the stage.

“And it’s exquisite to hear a male singing that high. And it’s even more breathtaking to watch other males in the audience see this handsome young man walking out on stage – they don’t know what’s going to come out – and then suddenly this rare jewel of a voice.”

Since Covid forced performing artists into live streaming and performing in empty concert halls, the petite framed Marino has augmented his stage presence with a stunning wardrobe of gender-defying costumes.

Before Covid, it was all so strict, all boring black tuxedoes, he says.

“But no audience? I say, you know what, I will dress for fun. I will use sequins. I will use high heels, why can I not use fashion like a pop artist? When Covid came, it was the first time I wore a skirt.”

The flamboyant attire and vintage jewellery (“I’m very picky about my jewellery … brands want to give me jewellery, like Cartier, but I say no thank you”) never detracts from the pure artistry of the voice however, a voice that forced the sopranist to grow a rhino’s skin over a dove’s heart early in life.

Growing up in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, as the child of academics working long hours under Hugo Chavez’s regime, Mariño and his two siblings were kept occupied with multiple after school activities. Marino studied piano from an early age, studied ballet from the age of 11 and sang in a choir. Participation in Venezuela’s national sport, baseball, was de rigueur.

It was only when the singer became a teenager that his world began to disintegrate. By 14 his voice still had not broken. He was constantly bullied at school, verbally taunted and physically assaulted. He eventually went to his mother, begging her to take him to a doctor. He wanted to be “fixed”.

“I just wanted to have a solution,” he says.

“Kids can be very very cruel and it was a very painful time. But now I like to think of it as a preparation for the future, because being on a stage is also not easy, especially being on stage singing. It is so so personal.”

Mariño’s larynx was showing no signs of lengthening. His speaking voice was likely to remain softly high-pitched indefinitely. Surgery was discussed. But one doctor, upon learning of the teenager’s choir participation, suggested to his mother her son forgo surgery for the time being and “just keep singing”.

“At this point in time singing for me was never a passion but at least in the choir it was the one place where I felt normal,” he says.

“But it was not my passion because it was too easy … and I think we humans are always looking for ways to complicate our lives. When things are too easy, we think that it’s not worth it.”

Mariño wanted to be a ballet dancer.

“I was so passionate about it. I woke up super early, and I was very strict. And that’s where I really learned how to be disciplined. You have to do it every day, you cannot stop. And we had some very good teachers from the Bolshoi in Venezuela at the time. I could see how painful it was. How hard you had to work. It was hard so it was worth it.”

It was his mother who persuaded him to try one semester of studying singing. If it didn’t work out, he could switch to dance.

The first semester at Caracas’s National Conservatory, Mariño discovered baroque music. Handel, Monteverdi, Vivaldi.

“But they really didn’t know what to do with me,” he says. “It was very difficult. But a good friend who was also a singer, she said ‘go to Europe’.”

At 18, Mariño entered the Conservatoire de Paris. He supported himself working on hotel reception desks and, briefly, at Disneyland Paris.

He also persuaded legendary Salzburg-based American soprano Barbara Bonney to teach him everything she knew. Along with the lyric soprano vocal technique he continues to finely hone, Bonney taught him how to survive in the opera industry.

“She taught me how to be an artist, how to behave in this business, and also what to expect,” he says.

“She told me her stories about about about her career, her divorces. She told me how lonely it is to be a singer, because of the travel – it’s a very, very lonely life, very difficult to have a relationship.”

Mariño’s solo debut at the age of 24 at the Halle Handel festival in Germany, singing the castrato role of Alessandro in Berenice, was a triumph. The now 31-year-old has been working constantly ever since. He has toured the US, South America, Canada, Japan, South Korea and pretty much everywhere in Europe.

He has three solo albums to his name and last year made his operatic debut in the Glyndebourne festival’s first-ever production of Handel’s Semele.

Dyer introduced Mariño to Australian audiences in 2022. In that space between visits, the Venezuelan’s voice has developed considerably, the artistic director says.

“It’s a lot more powerful and it has a lot more colour.”

His lower register has this rather rich plum colour. But when he gets high, it gets whiter, it gets lighter in style and becomes very bright … and then he just keeps on going higher, and then higher.”

Mariño’s commitment to his craft has given him the ability to transcend the technical details of what’s asked of him on the page, Dyer says.

“He’ll go deeper in his commitment to it and he does it with passion. That’s what it is. It’s extreme passion.”

• Samuel Mariño and the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra perform and the Melbourne Recital Centre 13-16 February, and Sydney’s City Recital Hall on 18-22 February.