Treasures from Malta

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Treasures from Malta

Francesca Balzan

32 episodes

8 months ago

Joseph Calleja is one of the world’s foremost tenors. He has performed in numerous operatic roles, solo performances and concerts to great acclaim and has scooped up several major international awards, since his early operatic debut at 19 years of age at the Astra Theatre in Gozo. He is a recording artist with one of the top recording labels and has been nominated for the Grammy awards. Much sought after, his life is a whirlwind of appearances on the major stages of the world. From the Met in...

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Society & Culture,

All content for Treasures from Malta is the property of Francesca Balzan and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Joseph Calleja is one of the world’s foremost tenors. He has performed in numerous operatic roles, solo performances and concerts to great acclaim and has scooped up several major international awards, since his early operatic debut at 19 years of age at the Astra Theatre in Gozo. He is a recording artist with one of the top recording labels and has been nominated for the Grammy awards. Much sought after, his life is a whirlwind of appearances on the major stages of the world. From the Met in...

Show more...

Society & Culture,

Episodes (20/32)

Treasures from Malta

Meet tenor Joseph Calleja

Joseph Calleja is one of the world’s foremost tenors. He has performed in numerous operatic roles, solo performances and concerts to great acclaim and has scooped up several major international awards, since his early operatic debut at 19 years of age at the Astra Theatre in Gozo. He is a recording artist with one of the top recording labels and has been nominated for the Grammy awards. Much sought after, his life is a whirlwind of appearances on the major stages of the world. From the Met in...

2 years ago

1 hour 2 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet artist and art historian Joseph Paul Cassar

Joseph Paul Cassar is an artist and art historian whose studies have taken him from Africa to Australia, and he now resides and lectures in North America. He is a specialist on African and Modern European art and lectures at prestigious institutions and Universities in and around Washington DC. But his heart lies in the modern period of Maltese art, and amongst his many, many published studies he has produced two landmark publications that chart the rise of modernism in the visual arts ...

2 years ago

1 hour 8 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet philosopher and poet Michael Zammit

Michael Zammit is a poet and a philosopher who has a tendency to look East. He has mastered the difficult language of Sanskrit, and has studied and written extensively about it. He draws lessons from the great philosophical traditions of the East and finds connections with that of the West, using the East as his starting point. He has translated and adapted into Maltese a number of texts including several for the theatre and continues to lecture on both Western and Eastern philosophy in vario...

2 years ago

54 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet theatre historian Vicki Ann Cremona

Vicki Ann Cremona is a prolific and distinguished academic who originally studied and taught French. In time she was drawn to theatre studies and dance, and has approached them from so many angles through her research and papers ranging from the architecture of theatres, to costume, to carnival. She has written extensively on these subjects and much more besides. She is without doubt the leading authority on the history of carnival in Malta and has produced a seminal book on the subject. She ...

2 years ago

59 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet soprano Gillian Zammit

Gillian Zammit is elegance personified. Her petite frame belies the incredibly powerful singing voice that has made her a household name. Her musical repertoire is vast and she is equally comfortable singing Baroque opera as she is with 20th century compositions. She has worked alongside such greats as Placido Domingo and Joseph Calleja and sung to much acclaim in the US and across the major capitals of Europe. She is consistently lauded in reviews and while her musical prowess is at its peak...

2 years ago

59 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet author Philip Farrugia Randon

Philip Farrugia Randon is somewhat of a polymath with a multi-faceted career. He graduated as a lawyer in 1973, while simultaneously broadcasting programmes on radio and tv. Throughout his working life as a lawyer, specializing in banking law, he has engaged constantly with the arts. He is a practicing watercolourist as well as an art connoisseur who has penned countless articles and many books about amongst others, Caravaggio and J.M.W. Turner. He is a published poet and author. He has occup...

2 years ago

59 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet celebrity photographer Lorenzo Agius

Lorenzo Agius is a celebrity photographer of Maltese descent. His roots are in art and art history but early on in his career he took up photography as his medium, working his way up from photography assistant to a fully-fledged freelance photographer. For decades now he has specialized in portraiture and fashion. Throughout his career, he has produced iconic images of practically all the most celebrated actors and models of our time, sometimes revisiting these sitters through different shoot...

2 years ago

56 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet artist and academic Vince Briffa

Vince Briffa made the cross-over from industry to the academic field, while maintaining an art practice that has established him as one of the leading lights in the contemporary visual arts in Malta. He has attended numerous prestigious international art residencies. He has been invited to participate in countless exhibitions with important international artists and continues to explore the visual arts in both new media, and traditional media such as sculpture and painting. In 2002 he was ins...

3 years ago

57 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet scenic artist Carmel Said

Scenic artist Carmel Said has had a remarkable career. From art studies in Malta he went on to obtain further art degrees in London where he worked his way up to become one of the finest scenic artists, producing incredible sets that are beautiful works of painting and sculpture for the biggest names in the industry. From Paris to New York, if you spot a beautiful shop window, say at Louis Vuitton or Dior, it is likely to have been produced by Scenic Sets, his busy London workshop which he fo...

3 years ago

1 hour

Treasures from Malta

Meet percussionist and sound artist Renzo Spiteri

Renzo Spiteri is a multi-percussionist, composer and improviser, a multimedia artist, a field recordist, sound designer, and arts collaborator. In essence he is a sound artist who seems to have no restrictions, such is his versatility and the extent of his experimentation. Literally every and any particular sound can be turned into music in his hands. His practice has taken him all over the world collaborating with persons working in all the arts, from the visual to the performative to the wr...

3 years ago

1 hour 3 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet historian Joan Abela

Dr Joan Abela is synonymous with archives. She is a well published historian who achieved distinction throughout her academic journey and now in turn fires up her students with enthusiasm for the past. She has wowed us with her many discoveries, her incredible, infectious passion for the past but most of all her almost militant attitude to combat neglect and defend archives and their collections with extraordinary zeal. Her conviction about preserving at all costs, in the face of a laissez-fa...

3 years ago

58 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet ceramicist Nico Conti

Nico Conti is a ceramic artist who is working clay in exciting, radical new ways. From his undergraduate days at MCAST in Malta to finishing top of his class at the Royal College of Art in 2019, he has continually excelled. In the short space of a few years he has won numerous prestigious awards and scholarships. He is represented by major galleries and has already exhibited in craft fairs where his work was singled out for praise. His name is now synonymous with 3d printing, but his wo...

3 years ago

53 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet photographer Daniel Cilia

Daniel Cilia is one of Malta’s foremost photographers. His artistry is much admired, going to great lengths not only to record what might soon disappear, but making seemingly impossible photographs that continuously elicit awe and wonder from his ever growing fan base. He is a Gozitan with a deep love for his birth island. Through his photography, and, it must be said, incessant curiosity he has made several discoveries and proposed theories about cultural conundrums. He has also increasingly...

3 years ago

1 hour 1 minute

Treasures from Malta

Meet designer Suzanne Sharp

Rug and interiors designer Suzanne Sharp has had a very colourful career! Together with her husband, Christopher, she has risen to become one of the leading exponents in rug design internationally. Her roots are Maltese, and indeed the first shop that set the couple on their incredibly successful design path, was a shop they opened in Sliema. Since then they have never looked back, establishing the Rug Company and growing their business in several areas. From retailing traditional oriental ru...

3 years ago

57 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet maritime archaeologist Timmy Gambin

Timmy Gambin is a maritime archaeologist and an associate professor at the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta. His interest is specifically in wrecks that lie deep below Maltese waters - whether they are ancient or date to World War II you can be sure he has either discovered them or knows all there is to know about them. He has directed several underwater surveys not only in Maltese waters but also in Spain, Italy, Croatia and other parts of the Mediterranean b...

3 years ago

1 hour 21 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet food writer Matty Cremona

Matty Cremona is an accomplished cook and food history writer. She has written four books and numerous articles about the history of food and the context of dining in Malta. Her knowledge of Malta’s food history, honed through years of research both in the archives and in her kitchen, has revealed new information and translated these old writings into modern-day doable recipes. The interest in food, what it means and how we prepared and ate it in the past, is universal. But Matty Cremona take...

3 years ago

54 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet Music historian Anna Borg Cardona

Anna Borg Cardona is a musician and music researcher whose eyes fire up with incredible excitement whenever she talks about the discoveries she keeps making in our many rich historic archives here in Malta. Through the decades she has discovered musicians and musical instrument makers from the past, she has uncovered and played long forgotten sheet music, and pieced together much of Malta’s rich ethnographic music history. She has lectured extensively at the University and delivered many publ...

3 years ago

52 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet philosopher Joe Friggieri

Prof. Joe Friggieri is a philosopher, a playwright, a theatre director, a poet and an author, not to mention a person who has been an influencer in the arts in Malta from decades before an influencer became ‘a thing’. He has packed all of this into a very industrious lifetime that commenced its academic trajectory with Ph.D.s from both Milan and Oxford, followed by a professorship at the University of Malta. On a parallel with his academic career, he has written and directed numerous plays, h...

3 years ago

59 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet conductor Wayne Marshall OBE

Wayne Marshall is a conductor, pianist and organist of great international repute. He has performed widely in all of the principal concert halls and opera houses around the world, both as conductor and pianist, and sometimes simultaneously ! He is celebrated for his interpretation of Gershwin and Bernstein and other 20th century composers however his repertoire is actually far greater than that. His achievements have earned him numerous plaudits and earlier this year he was honoured with an O...

3 years ago

41 minutes

Treasures from Malta

Meet curator Frà John Critien

In this podcast episode, we meet a knight! Frà John Edward Critien is a professed member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the only Maltese to have ever been elevated to the highest ranks of this International Order. For several years he lived in the Order’s Headquarters at the historic Palazzo Malta in Rome where he was Conservator of the Magistral Palace Library and Archives and Curator of the art collections of the Order. In 2000 he moved to Malta to take up residence at F...

4 years ago

58 minutes