By Gino Castaldo – La Repubblica
22.10.1988
In his 30-year career, he has sung the cantabile, a huge imposing songbook that reaches statistical tally proportions.
What did this voice mean to us? This voice so ductile that it can be sometimes so hyperuranic and crystalline, sometimes warm and sly, sometimes virtuosic, sometimes softly interpretive. It is “the” Italian voice of these 30 years.
She is the great mother, but also a passionate woman, yet her voice always has something that makes her unattainable, as if she could exist even beyond the character to which she belongs. And this feeling of partial unreality is not only due to the recent disappearance. He was there even when his face was familiar to the entire television audience.
Mina was nice, friendly, human when she talked and joked with guests, but when she began to sing something special always happened; her golden uvula seemed to access some strange and angelic region not quite accessible to ordinary mortals. All this began at a precise, perfectly recognizable moment, namely when Mina sang and brought the song “Il cielo in una stanza” to success, thanks to the decisive meeting with Gino Paoli. Mina in that piece discovered the possibility of giving voice to an important song, of making it so high, so distant, so inaccessible. There she became a true performer, one of those voices that are born so rarely that they are considered unique and unrepeatable phenomena.
Legend has it that at the height of her career Mina was courted heavily by Americans. and we have no doubt about the outcome that a Mina launched by the American star system would have had in the world. But Mina said no, who knows whether out of snobbery or fear, or perhaps to remain to the end an Italian product, one of the few, musically, of which we can be proud.
