Cautious Calleja pulls out of Japan tour

Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja and soprano Anna Netrebko have pulled out of New York’s Metropolitan Opera tour in Japan citing concern about post-earthquake radiation.

The news travelled around the globe yesterday, as the international media reported that the Met Opera arrived in Japan for its 14-performance tour in Nagoya and Tokyo without two of its leading stars.

The BBC reported that the Met Opera management had reassured its staff and performers that there was no danger associated with the tour, even though the radiation leak at the Fukushima nuclear power plant had yet to be fully contained.

However, when contacted, Mr Calleja told The Times: “When I heard that there still was a leak, I preferred to be cautious health wise.”

Mr Calleja’s decision to withdraw from the tour was “very difficult”, but there were personal issues which kept him back from joining the entourage.

“People take decisions based on the information they have about their family medical history.

“It would be better to risk making a wrong but cautious decision than suffer the consequences,” he said.

“At the end of the day this was not a frivolous decision. This decision was a very tough one and it hurt me first and foremost as an artist but also professionally and financially. It boiled down to whether I should go there and spend the coming years not knowing whether or not I had been affected by radiation contamination.”

The earthquake and monster tsunami ravaged Japan’s northeast region in March, crippling the nuclear plant 140 miles northeast of Tokyo. Since then, it has been leaking radiation into the environment. Nagoya is further south, down the Pacific coast.

“Anything can happen in the volcanic world of opera, and with this tour it seems that our volcano has momentarily erupted,” Met Opera’s General Manager Peter Gelb said.

In an effort to shore up the casting, soprano star Barbara Frittoli agreed to move into the role of Mimì in La Bohème to replace Ms Netrebko, while young soprano Marina Poplavskaya was released from a concert in Paris in order to join the Met tour and will be replacing Ms Frittoli in the role of Elisabeth in Don Carlo.

To replace Mr Calleja, tenor Marcelo Álvarez cancelled a vacation in Argentina and fellow tenor star Rolando Villazón rearranged his schedule. Another replacement singer, tenor Alexey Dolgov, was located in his country outside of Moscow.

Ms Netrebko changed her mind because of the emotional weight of having also lived through the tragedy of Chernobyl.

She didn’t feel that she would be able to present her best performances and did not want to disappoint her Japanese fans, according to Met Opera.

Last month, the Japan tour was hit by three other cancellations. The statement said James Levine, the Met’s Music Director, withdrew because of poor health and was replaced by Fabio Luisi, the Met Opera’s Principal Guest Conductor. Russian star mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina also cancelled because of illness and was replaced by Ekaterina Gubanova, a younger Russian star. German tenor Jonas Kaufmann withdrew because of his concerns about going to Japan at this time. He was replaced by Yonghoon Lee, a rising Korean star.

The Met company in Japan includes some 350 orchestra musicians, chorus members, dancers, stage crew and guest stars.

The first performance takes place in Nagoya on Saturday, with Tokyo to follow between June 8 and June 19. This is the company’s seventh tour of Japan.