A voice like sunshine

There's something about the honeyed sweetness of Joseph Calleja's voice that seems to evoke memories of a golden age, as if this young tenor carried within his vocal cords a secret passed down from bygone generations, writes Mike Silverman for the Associated Press:

.."Nobody sings like that anymore," said Craig Rutenberg, director of music administration for the Metropolitan Opera. "His voice is just so intrinsically beautiful, with a very old-fashioned vibrato. It's sort of like sunshine to me." Since Calleja began performing professionally in his native Malta in 1997, when he was barely 19, he has appeared in many of the world's leading opera houses and recital halls..

The tenor is feeling more confident about his dramatic credibility these days, having recently lost 45 pounds off his 6-foot-2 frame. "I had really turned fat," he said. "But now I'm working out every day, except when I have a performance. Let's be frank ... to be a good actor, 50 percent is looking the part. It would be very hard to portray a romantic poet when you're 300 pounds big."

Calleja loves to talk about the influences that have formed his style and sound, and when he does, one name stands out above all — his first and only teacher, fellow Maltese tenor Paul Asciak, for whom he auditioned when he was 15. "I kind of knew I had a talent because I had been singing since I was a kid, in church, school choirs, rock bands," he said. "My sister jokes about it, how many times she used to scream to shut me up, now she can't believe people pay to hear me singing."

He became Asciak's only pupil. "I was very dedicated and intense," he says," sometimes too intense, because I lost much of my teenage years." Asciak, now 86, recalled his astonishment when he first heard Calleja's voice — its "fresh, pure and velvety" timbre in the lower register and "lightness and flexibility" when higher. It reminded him of some of the "Golden Age singers, a school of singing I have always greatly admired but now seems almost lost."..

..Calleja takes great pride in his Maltese heritage and still makes his home there. He recently separated from his wife, soprano Tatiana Lisnic, with whom he has two small children. For an island nation of fewer than 400,000 residents, Calleja said, "we're a very cosmopolitan society."

Yet few Maltese have made it prominently onto the world stage in recent years, and Calleja is keenly aware of the pressure that puts on him. "I'm viewed in my country as an ambassador, an object of tremendous pride," he said. "Obviously, if I mess up, it's going to be very disappointing for many of my fellow citizens."...