It's a sweltering July night in Floriana, Malta. Malta's high society, young and old, are in their Sunday best, several thousand seated facing a stage in an outdoor square, hundreds more lining the street running its length, craning for the best views of the evening's performers, Ronan Keating, Neapolitan singing star Gigli d'Alessio and the closest the small Mediterranean island has got to a national hero, tenor Joseph Calleja. Calleja, 34, has sung at this summer concert since 2006, and now, as Malta's first cultural ambassador, he is the evening's host as well as the undisputed main attraction.
The programme intersperses the chart stars' hits with Calleja's own signature tunes – a clear and golden E lucevan le stelle from Tosca, La Traviata's Brindisi, and songs from his newest album, Be My Love. He laughs and jokes with the crowd, and closes the evening duetting with Keating on Hallelujah. Audiences who saw him earlier this year as Rodolfo in Covent Garden's La Bohème (where critics hailed him as "glorious" and "making operatic history"), or on stage at New York's Metropolitan Opera as Faust ("he has one of the loveliest voices in opera … pure, sunny and strong"), might raise an eyebrow to hear him putting as much heart and passion into bawdy Neapolitan folk songs or Because You're Mine, but Calleja is unapologetic.
"I hate the phrase crossover. It makes me think of dying - crossing over to the other side," he says. "What's wrong with a classical voice singing lighter stuff? Do you stop being an opera singer because you do that? If you eat fish, does it mean you can't eat meat? There are two kinds of music – good and bad. Some crossover is good music, some of it is awful. But isn't that the case with everything?"
But there is one aspect of the crossover industry that he does get heated about. "What's bad is not crossover, what's bad is singers who've never set foot on an opera stage being called opera stars. That's like me saying I'm an F1 driver just because once I drove an F1 car."
His new album is a tribute to one of the 20th century's best loved crossover stars, Mario Lanza. One could say it has been 20 years in the making – it was Lanza, in the 1951 movie The Great Caruso, who inspired the 13-year-old Calleja to start singing opera. "The minute I heard him I thought: 'This is the most beautiful sound a man can do.'" Aged 15, he was put in touch with the noted Maltese tenor Paul Asciak, himself a former international singer, who rapidly realised that he had something very special on his hands.
"The first time I sang for him, I remember him watching me. He had really big glasses," says Calleja, "and he made this startled gesture" – he mimics eye-popping incredulity – "and I thought: OK, I'm either very good or very bad. Turns out I was very good," he says with a chuckle.
I meet Asciak, now nearly 90 and still Calleja's only teacher, after the concert. "I'd never heard anything like him – the timbre. The top register was a bit white – he was very young and we didn't force it," he recalls. "We went slowly, slowly, slowly. One has to be careful." And as important as the singing was the listening. "He didn't know what opera was, it was very important to put him in the picture. I made him listen to a lot of old, good singers. He needed to hear what he should be like, whom he should copy," says Asciak.
It was perhaps this marinade in the golden voices of opera's past that has helped create a tenor whose voice critics have hailed for its warmth, grace and lightness of timbre, a voice that "harks back to a quality I thought we had long lost", according to the conductor Riccardo Chailly.
"Very few people today learn to sing the right way," says Calleja. "It goes beyond just producing the notes correctly. It's how you grace a line of singing. He sings the opening line of La Bohème's most famous aria, Che Gelida Manina, perfectly correctly, but flatly. "But sing it like this" – and he repeats the phrase, but with phrasing, colour, warmth and vibrato. The voice is a fine bordeaux, a St-Emilion. It needs timbre, and expert wine-makers – an expert teacher – and you need time and maturity, the right repertoire and the right choices."
The question of choices is key. Calleja hopes to have several decades of performing ahead of him, and his voice is still developing. "If things go well, I will mature into a lyrical spinto … [but] for the next five years at least I want to be in my repertoire and excel it in. I don't sing stuff that I don't shine in. Why would you? Or do stuff that might damage your voice? And when – if – it's time move on, I will. I take my cue from the voice."
With a wide repertoire already at his command, Carmen's Don José is to be added in a few years, and possibly some more Puccini – maybe Cavaradossi. Meanwhile, one of Puccini's most famous arias, Nessun Dorma, is firmly under Calleja's belt and is one of the numbers he will sing at tomorrow's Last Night of the Proms. Any Italianate tenor performing this will, of course, invite comparisons with its most famous interpreter, Luciano Pavarotti. Calleja is used to the "new Pavarotti" tag. Is it a blessing or a curse? "Comparisons are inevitable, so I take them with a pinch of salt," he says. "When a serious critic mentions it then it's a compliment, of course. Is it added pressure? Certainly. [But] I don't take compliments very seriously because if you do, then you have to take the criticisms seriously as well."
One thing Calleja shares with Pavarotti is his populist touch. "Some people think that to go to an opera you need a PhD. No! All you need is a good pair of ears and a heart that's beating in the right rhythm. I love music and when I'm happy I sing – and I'm happy a lot! And when I'm sad I sing as well. What is singing, at the end of the day, but another form of expression?"
Joseph Calleja performs at the Last Night of the Proms on 8 September. The event is broadcast live on Radio 3 and BBC1. His new album Be My Love is released this week on Decca Classics.
The journalist's flight to Malta was paid for by Universal Records.
