Everyone heard about the Joseph Calleja annual concert on the Granaries; but what about the Calleja – Attard Concert? Probably you have never heard of it.
I know that the concert will not be possible without Joseph Calleja and his friends. Calleja improves year after year, like the good wine he loves to drink. It is not just the singing which was great; it is his whole demeanour which make the crowds fall for him. That frequent touch of humour makes a big difference – for the better.
I just loved Claudio Baglioni. He is elegance and good manners personified. Then there is his voice: just fantastic. His singing was also so nostalgic.
UK X-Factor winner Leona Lewis, was lovely to listen to as well as to look at. The gentle giant from Wales in the form of bass-baritone Bryn Terfel is such a good actor besides being an excellent singer. Federica Falzon was not awed by Calleja. A nice future beckons her.
Ok. Ok, you may ask. But what about Attard?
Bear with me just a little bit more.
Imagine Calleja and his friends singing on a simple platform in the middle of the Granaries? Would it be the same experience? Definitively not, I would say. The concert is not an audio experience; it is, at the very least, an audio-visual experience.
Enter Attard.
The concert would not have been what it was were it not for the input of Anton Attard, the broadcasting and audio-visual guru.
Whenever I go to the concert I find myself alternatively looking at what is happening live on stage and what is being projected and communicated through the large screen on both sides of the grand stand. The physical presence of the singers and their mediated projection synergise into one organic whole. The close-ups make us look into the event. The big close ups of Calleja, for example, make us penetrate his very soul. We can see the movement of every facial muscle. We stop looking at him but we look inside him.
The general vistas trough the cameras on cranes communicate to us the surrounding grandeur. We notice that we form part of a sea of individuals each one feeling what we are feeling at the same time that we are feeling it. I stop being an ‘I’ but morph into a gigantic ‘we’. The artistes on the grand stand, the audience on the Granaries, the Granaries themselves, the fantastically lip church of St Publius, l-Argotti and the clear skies blend together into one larger than life event…. And I am part of it.
Although I am seated, and thus in a stationary position, I roam all around the place – and in places far away - thanks to the physically moving steady cam, the video material that accompanies the singing and the tertiary movement communicated through the large screens. The sensation of being in one place at the same time that I am in many places is delightful.
This year the producers used another ‘trick’ to make us feel one with the artistes. Instead of making them look greater than life they produced short clips that brought them close to us. A person with a camera accompanied them for a day (or perhaps a few hours) and them produced and projected a short video clip. The best one was that showing the gentle giant from Wales. Wisely enough he non-verbally continued on stage the effect of what we had just seen in the clip.
The person responsible for all this was Anton Attard.
I am not suggesting for a moment that the name of the concern is changed. But I want to point out that the concert without the accompanying visual experience would not be half as nice.