Joseph Calleja: 'My best has just started'

Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja has told international news agency Reuters that his best has only just started.

Calleja is about to join America's soprano sweetheart Renee Fleming for a broadcast from Jerusalem and sings Verdi's "Requiem" at a BBC Proms concert in London on Sunday.

"It is another major achievement for Calleja who is young for a tenor but already is being compared to greats like Luciano Pavarotti or Beniamino Gigli -- even though Calleja doesn't find the comparisons particularly helpful," he told writer Michael Roddy.

"Pavarotti, he added, came into his prime at a time when LP and CD recordings were money-spinners -- before piracy and the Internet killed off sales -- and opera still got an occasional airing on commercial television instead of niche art networks.

"Of course I'm flattered when someone says you remind me of Luciano -- I'd be a liar if I said a compliment like that doesn't give me pleasure -- but from saying that to saying you're the next one after him is a whole different kettle of fish. You'd have to be a little bit crazy to even have the expectation to fill his boots."

Calleja explained how he got the opera bug from the movies -- specifically, the 1951 bio-pic "The Great Caruso," with Mario Lanza playing the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso who rose from Neapolitan street singer to superstar.

"'The Great Caruso' is probably why I'm an opera singer today," Calleja said, adding that the fact the movie shows Caruso swigging wine to lubricate his vocal cords added to the allure of singing for an impressionable 13-year-old.

Now Calleja sings in the world's great opera houses, the Metropolitan in New York, Covent Garden in London, opposite the likes of Anna Netrebko and Fleming.

He and Netrebko made headlines recently when they said they would not participate in a long-planned Metropolitan Opera tour of Japan, because of the uncertainty about radiation from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. The tour went ahead without them, but Calleja, noting a history of thyroid problems in his family, and conflicting information about the radiation leaks given out by the Japanese government, sticks to his guns.

"If I have a thyroid problem six years down the line how would I have known, since it's triggered by even low amounts of radiation? ... I mean there are some comments online that you're cowards (Calleja and Netrebko) but I have two young children and financially at least they depend on me...I'm 33 and if I were 75 I would have gone, things would have been different," Calleja said.

Similarly, he said, he made the right decision in taking a five-year gap year in his recording career. 

The slow but steady approach has helped him to improve his voice, which some critics said had too much vibrato, and to keep it in good condition -- unlike some singers.

"This is probably why in 14 years of my career I have never had a vocal crisis, never had an operation. And I think that's what has happened to a majority (of singers) but when I can't deliver what I feel I should deliver to my audience I cancel and give that chance to someone else.

"Singing for me is a matter of pride -- like a winemaker who wants the best results from his vines."