Almost a year after cancelling his 2022 Melbourne recital due to illness, one of the world’s great basses finally delivered a program of songs and arias he considers an “itinerary” of his almost 50-year career.

It was worth the wait, as  Ferruccio Furlanetto treated the audience to a showcase of his mighty voice and extraordinary expressiveness.

Ferruccio Furlanetto. Photo supplied

Accompanied by Russian pianist Natalia Sidorenko, the Italian returned to Melbourne Recital Centre, where he made his Melbourne debut in 2017 with a program of songs by Mussorgsky and Rachmaninov. There was some overlap for this concert, most notably Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which sees Death visiting, in turn, a mother with a sickly child, a dying woman, drunken peasant and battlefield victims. Anyone who attended that earlier concert would surely relish the chance to hear Furlanetto’s masterful interpretation again.

With astute, agile shifts in dynamics and pitch, all the way down to those renowned, low rumbling notes, he revealed the full dramatic potential of this four-song cycle. Never more so than with “Lullaby”’s final, heartbreaking whisper, as the imagined child is rocked to eternal sleep.

Later, at the conclusion of...