Calleja was only 19 when he made his operatic debut as Macduff in Verdi’s Macbeth at the Astra Theatre in Malta, shortly before winning an award in the Hans Gabor Belvedere Competition. He went on to win the 1998 Caruso Competition in Milan and was a prize winner in Plácido Domingo’s Operalia in 1999.
Since then, Calleja has gone on to appear with most of the world’s great opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, Dresden’s Semperoper, the Frankfurt Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, and Munich’s Bavarian State Opera.
Having sung an impressive 28 leading roles to date, he is noted for his portrayals of Verdi’s Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto and Alfredo in La Traviata; Rodolfo in Puccini’s La Bohème and B. F. Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly; Donizetti’s Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor, Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore, and Leicester in Maria Stuarda; the title characters of Gounod’s Faust and Roméo et Juliette; Tebaldo in Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi; and Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Highlights from recent operatic seasons include the title characters in new productions of Faust and Tales of Hoffmann at the Metropolitan Opera; Alfredo in La Traviata opposite Renée Fleming, Adorno in Simon Boccanegra alongside Plácido Domingo, and another turn in the title role of Faust at Covent Garden; new productions of La Bohème, opposite Anna Netrebko, and La Traviata at the Lyric Opera of Chicago; Maria Stuarda alongside Joyce DiDonato in concerts with the Deutsche Oper Berlin; and a new staging of Rigoletto at the Bavarian State Opera.
Calleja appears extensively in concerts throughout the world, singing with leading orchestras at summer festivals, including Salzburg, and in outdoor concerts in front of tens of thousands of people in Malta, Paris, and Munich. After co-headlining 2012’s Last Night of the BBC Proms, Calleja returned to the London Festival in 2013 for a gala performance at the Royal Albert Hall and an open-air concert marking the Last Night of the Proms in Hyde Park.
During the 2014-15 season, he returned to the Met for Lucia di Lammermoor and Macbeth, the latter of which co-stars Zeljko Lucic and Netrebko. In the coming season, at the Royal Opera House Calleja makes his role debut as Riccardo in a new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera and reunites with Netrebko for La Bohème; and at Deutsche Oper Berlin he sings Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor and portrays Ruggero in Rolando Villazón’s new staging of Puccini’s La rondine.
As an exclusive Decca Classics recording artist since 2003, the tenor boasts an extensive discography that includes complete operas and concert repertoire, as well as five solo albums: The Golden Voice, Tenor Arias, The Maltese Tenor, Be My Love: A Tribute to Mario Lanza, and Amore.
Born in Malta in 1978, Joseph Calleja began singing at the age of 16. Calleja was selected to serve as Malta’s first cultural ambassador in 2012. He was voted Gramophone Magazine’s 2012 Artist of the Year and won the 2014 International Opera Awards’ Readers’ Award.
Upcoming concerts
- 2. 12. 2015 - Pressburger Weihnachten - Janoska Ensemble
- 9. 12. 2015 - Christmas concert of Simona Šaturová
- 10. 2. 2016 - Juan Diego Florez
More information can be found at www.kapos.sk
Ján Korecký, Promoter, Kapos agency
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