"[...] And then off he goes, right into L’elisir d’amore “Una furtiva lagrima”, a slight smokiness in the lower register, gentle frost in the middle range, pure fire on the top. Vocal drama from a distant era, like we can hear on the old shellac recordings featuring the voices of the greatest of the great: Caruso, Gigli..."
RECITAL, NIKOLAISAAL, POTSDAM: Der Tagesspiegel, August 2005
REVIEWS: RECITALS & CONCERTS
Reviews of various recitals, concerts and gala.
Nikolaisaal, Potsdam, Germany
27 August 2005
· Concert with Tatiana LisnicMÄrkische Allgemeine, 21 november 2005
Languor Without Schmaltz
Laeisz Hall: The Young Tenor Joseph Calleja Conquered the Hearts of His Listeners
He came, he saw and he conquered in a heartbeat. Without a warm-up, he performed the aria of arias, Nemorino’s “Una furtiva lagrima” from Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore. Calleja gave expression to furtive tears and concentrated sighs with a voice blessed with a firmly grounded bottom register and a glowing top. … The secret of his success may be that here and now he sings as beautifully as the good old tenors on the shellac recordings.
Ms. Lisnic scored her greatest triumph in the second part, dedicated to the French repertoire: she delineated Gounod’s Marguerite and Juliette with girlish playfulness. … After a number of bravura pieces and orchestral intermezzi… they moved onto the climatic duets. The sold-out house rewarded the performance and the block of encores with standing ovations.
Ulrich Amling, Der Tagesspiegel, 29 august 2005
Tatjana Lisnic and Joseph Calleja in Potsdam
Anyone who celebrates a birthday by putting on a bel canto gala wants to warm the hearts of his guests. Dispensing with smooth rhetoric and thundering drama, the audience strolls through the garden of hope and melancholy. For its fifth birthday, Nikolai Hall in Potsdam treated itself to a flight into the night, with just a touch of autumnal chill breezing through it. 360,000 spectators have found their way to Rudy Recciotti’s futuristic concert hall since it opened. This is a statistic that certainly differentiates Nikolai Hall from the destiny of most bel canto heros: a lonely death in fading beauty.
In Joseph Calleja, the young Maltese star tenor, we had a man on stage who can leave even hard-bitten listeners with tears in their eyes. Excitedly and with youthful naïveté, he walks out on the platform, nothing in Calleja’s arsenal is more effective than a baffling magic trick. And then off he goes, right into L’elisir d’amore “Una furtiva lagrima”, a slight smokiness in the lower register, gentle frost in the middle range, pure fire on the top. Vocal drama from a distant era, like we can hear on the old shellac recordings featuring the voices of the greatest of the great: Caruso, Gigli…
Soprano Tatjana Lisnic imposes a somewhat daunting launch on her beautifully shaped voice with an aria from Bellini’s I Puritani, but then she gains freedom and adds on a cat‑like coquetterie. Scott Lawson on the podium of the German Symphony Orchestra in Babelsberg made sure the evening didn’t drown in tears. He transformed every overture into crackling pork, which perfectly complemented the suckling pig roasting on the spit outside Nikolai Hall.
(Translation: Donald Arthur)
