Joseph Calleja and the Liverpool connection

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic travelled to Malta for the 'ground-breaking' Joseph Calleja summer concert this past weekend. Joe Riley writes in the Liverpool Daily Post:

A 3,000-mile round trip in three days to give one concert as the backing band to an emerging operatic superstar. Was it worth it? Yes, say the organisers, most certainly, indicated by a 3,000-strong sell-out audience demanding four encores, while the musicians saw it as an investment in both Liverpool and their own futures.

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, touring for the first time under the direction of their new and youngest-ever conductor, Vasily Petrenko, found themselves at the centre of a perfect solution to re-ignite their own international profile prior to Capital of Culture, and to provide new EU member Malta with the premiere concert at a rebuilt 18th-century island castle site in Valetta harbour.

The link was provided by the 28-year-old Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja, whose best-selling debut solo albums, conducted by Riccardo Chailly and Welsh National Opera music director Carlo Rizzi, were produced by the Liverpool Phil's incoming orchestra division director Andrew Cornall. Calleja was the youngest vocal artist ever signed to Decca: "We found him when he was auditioning as a stand-in for Pavarotti at the Royal Opera," says Andrew Cornall.

And now, the "Maltese Falcon" as Calleja has been dubbed, was repaying the debt, insisting that the Liverpool Phil play for his big home gig. Nothing was spared: at the last moment, Maltese president Dr Fenech Adami decided it was too good to miss - one reason why the Liverpool musicians had to sight-read the Maltese national anthem from copies hastily gathered at less than 24 hours' notice.

They more than rose to the challenge, adding to the programme some orchestral items, the Prelude to Act 1 of Carmen; the ballet suite from Gounod's Faust, the overture to Bellini's Norma, and most spectacularly, given the bonus of fireworks for a separate saint's day festival across the water, Rossini's William Tell Overture. Fast and furious - but not without challenges: "There were difficulties of hearing the balance in such open-air conditions," said Vasily Petrenko. "It was much harder work than it perhaps seemed. But they liked it, and we liked playing it," added Vasily, who also celebrated his 30th birthday with an impromptu party given by the orchestra. Such was the clamour for tickets and the traffic jams , the concert, under television lights, began 40 minutes late..

Moves are already afoot to bring Joseph Calleja to Liverpool next year, as part of the Phil's own revived summer classical pops. That would be a treat: Calleja makes a wonderful sound. He is an old-fashioned tenor in the style of the late Beniamino Gigli, with all the popular glamour appeal of a Mario Lanza. The Malta concert may not have been performed under ideal conditions (open-air, extraneous noise, high humidity, the odd hunting mosquito), but it was an unqualified public relations success for Liverpool. And it was populist, and none the worse for that...

The Joseph Calleja concert "made us forget the frustration so many of us feel at how downhill we are going..", writes Marisa Micallef