It’s 8am on a cloudy yet warm morning in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district, once associated with East Germany’s bohemian counterculture, but rapidly gentrified since the Wall fell more than 30 years ago. The Venezuelan-born male soprano Samuel Mariño has just returned to his apartment after walking his dog Leia, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. He moved to the German capital in 2018, following several years based in Paris.

Samuel Mariño

Samuel Mariño. Photo courtesy of Decca Classics.

Today, Mariño is wearing a blue denim collared shirt over a white T-shirt. For the cover photo of Sopranista, his recently released debut album for Decca, on which he sings arias by Mozart, Gluck and Joseph Boulogne – including some never recorded before by a male soprano – he chose a gorgeous, flowing, white Vivienne Westwood outfit, with chunky high heels.

The Westwood outfit is both a statement of admiration for the British designer’s fondness for upcycled materials and of his own mission to free classical music from strict gender boundaries. As Mariño prepares for his first trip Down Under to perform arias by Handel, Vivaldi and Hasse with the...