For tenor from Malta, a star-making role? (AP)

NEW YORK – There’s something most the sugary taste of carpenter Calleja’s vocalise that seems to interpret memories of a metallic age, as if this teen substance carried within his communicatory pants a info passed downbound from departed generations.

“Nobody sings same that anymore,” said Craig Rutenberg, administrator of penalization brass for the Metropolitan Opera. “His vocalise is meet so intrinsically beautiful, with a rattling old-fashioned vibrato. It’s variety of same light to me.”

Since Calleja began performing professionally in his autochthonous state in 1997, when he was meet 19, he has appeared in whatever of the world’s directive house houses and speechmaking halls. He has matured a aggregation of digit dozen roles and transcribed digit well-received unaccompanied albums.

It’s striking how ofttimes reviewers accomplish for subject comparisons when describing his voice. Some hit praised it as the most exciting text substance beatific since Luciano Pavarotti; others advert the obloquy of unreal singers from early eras, modify Enrico Caruso.

Yet despite his galore gifts, Calleja, as he freely acknowledges, has been a impact in progress. He has struggled at nowadays to place unitedly the elements of his vocalise — broad notes, color, respite control, kinetics — into a rank package. And his efforts at performing hit sometimes been rudimentary.

Now, at the geezerhood of 31, he is attractive on his highest-profile naming yet, preparing a newborn role, the denomination case in Jacques Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” (“The Tales of Hoffmann”) at the Met. The newborn production, directed by Tony-winning adventurer Sher, opens on Dec. 3 and module be programme springy to flick theaters around the concern in high-definition on Dec. 19.

A boast could provide Calleja a test near toward planetary stardom — and attain him perhaps the best-known goods from his tiny island commonwealth since a destined artful falcon of falsity and film.

Anything inferior than a bounteous success and he’s probable to move existence viewed as meet digit more among a pasture of precocious teen tenors on the underway house environs — or, perhaps worse, as a auspicious vocaliser who overreached by attractive on a persona for which he wasn’t ready.

But if Calleja is troubled most the stakes, it wasn’t plain during a farewell practice early this month, nor in an discourse during the meal fortuity that followed.

“When I started to think the persona in June, it was same a ready-made suit,” he said between bites of a eel sandwich. “It good the vocalise incredibly. And that’s good, because I don’t poverty to go on initiate and countenance same I’m doing it for the prototypal time. I poverty to BE Hoffmann.”

When the conversation turns to Calleja’s upbringing and the influences that hit bacilliform his call and sound, digit study stands discover above every — his prototypal and exclusive teacher, man state substance Apostle Asciak.

Asciak, today 86, recalled his amazement when he prototypal heard Calleja’s vocalise — its “fresh, clean and velvety” speech in the modify run and “lightness and flexibility” when higher. It reminded him of whatever of the “Golden Age singers, a edifice of melodic I hit ever greatly admired but today seems nearly lost.”

Asciak said he did his prizewinning to apprize Calleja in the structure of the older singers, action especially “perfect regularity of tone, uninterrupted phrasing and land diction.” Since Malta’s Royal Opera House had been blasted during WWII, opportunities for his enrollee to listen springy performances were limited. “So I had to speech to carpenter most opera,” Asciak said, “and inform him to recordings of whatever of the enthusiastic tenors of the past.”

Calleja said he adoptive what he could from the call of these singers, including “the knowledge to decreasing some broad state to a whisper.”

And their vibrato, that rapid, offense alteration in movement on a presented state that creates an uncommonly hearty speech — the light that Rutenberg hears in Calleja’s voice.

Calleja takes enthusiastic feel in his state acquisition and ease makes his bag there. He fresh distributed from his wife, high Tatiana Lisnic, with whom he has digit diminutive children.

Few state hit prefabricated it prominently onto the concern initiate in past years, and Calleja is keenly alive of the push that puts on him.

“I’m viewed in my land as an ambassador, an goal of large pride,” he said. “Obviously, if I disorderliness up, it’s feat to be rattling unsatisfactory for whatever of my man citizens.”

Each of the terminal individual summers he has presented a concert in Malta, and he’s campaigned hornlike but so farther unsuccessfully for the commonwealth to physique a full-scale performing subject edifice where house productions could be staged.

But though he knows that in digit significance he’s representing his country, what drives him most is his fuck of performing.

Recalling his past performances in Puccini’s “La Boheme” in Vienna, he says, “People were glaring backstage. Other than my children hunting up at me with loving eyes, I cannot envisage anything as bonny as melodic and creating that electrical stick between you and the audience.”