Alongside Baroque and Romantic operas and Italian songs, hits from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Godfather, and West Side Story will also feature at Joseph Calleja’s first song recital at the Opera House. At the season-opening concert of the Star Recitals with Piano series on 5 October, the Maltese tenor will appear before the Hungarian audience accompanied by pianist Sarah Tysman.
Joseph Calleja’s Budapest debut promises to be a truly exceptional occasion. His velvety voice is often mentioned in the same breath as such emblematic predecessors as Luciano Pavarotti, Beniamino Gigli, and Enrico Caruso. The Maltese tenor only began his singing career at the age of 16, and just three years later he was already performing the role of Macduff in Verdi’s Macbeth. Two years after that, he achieved an outstanding result at the Operalia competition founded by Plácido Domingo. Since then, Malta’s first cultural ambassador has sung the finest lyrical operatic roles in the world’s leading opera houses, with his voice preserved on dozens of CD and DVD recordings. Like Pavarotti, Joseph Calleja is also deeply engaged in charitable work on behalf of young musicians and disadvantaged children. In addition, he is fond of venturing into lighter genres and collaborating with their performers, having shared the stage at his annual gala concerts with the likes of Michael Bolton, Ronan Keating, Anastasia, and Zucchero.
Calleja’s first appearance at the Opera House will be just as eclectic as his rich repertoire, spanning genres from Baroque opera to Romantic songs and 20th-century musicals. Classical operatic traditions will be represented by popular concert arias from Handel’s Xerxes and Massenet’s Le Cid, as well as an excerpt from Puccini’s Tosca, a role the Maltese tenor has performed countless times, from New York’s Metropolitan Opera to the great opera houses of Paris, Madrid, and Munich. From the Italian Romantic song repertoire, works by Leoncavallo, Tosti, and Stefano Donaudy will be heard: pieces that his great role model Enrico Caruso first made indispensable in song recitals. As a further expansion of the Italian repertoire, the program also features two Romantic Slavic works: an excerpt from Dvořák’s Rusalka and Tchaikovsky’s Russian-language Goethe setting, based on one of Mignon’s songs from Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. To conclude the evening, after the well-known Anglo-Saxon hymn Amazing Grace, the world-famous tenor’s program will end with hits familiar from Hollywood films, including the theme from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the love theme from The Godfather, and popular numbers from The Sound of Music and West Side Story.
Joseph Calleja’s partner on stage will be French pianist Sarah Tysman, professor of vocal repertoire at the Berlin University of the Arts, who works regularly with such renowned singers as Piotr Beczała, Maria Bengtsson, Anna Prohaska, and Michael Volle. Over her nearly two-decade career, she has performed in almost every major opera house from Paris to Warsaw, while also serving as music director for prestigious institutions such as the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival.
Photos by Johannes Ifkovits / Felix Broede
