The next Lunchtime Concert will feature a vocal recital by baritone Kevin Caruana and pianist Alexander Vella Gregory. The two musicians will be interpreting the complete cycle of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel. The Lunchtime Concert, organised by the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, will be held on Wednesday, 9th May 2007 in the Music Room at St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Valletta at 12.35pm.
The performance starts at 12.30pm and lasts approximately 30 minutes. Tickets at Lm1.00 and Lm0.50 each for children under 12 and persons over 60 can be purchased from the Booking Office at St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Valletta, Tel: 21 223 200 (opening hours from 10.00am to 9.00pm daily).
Songs of Travel is a song cycle of nine songs written for baritone voice and piano, composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with poems selected from the Robert Louis Stevenson collection as lyrics.
Still in his early twenties, baritone Kevin Caruana has been performing in prominent venues around Malta and recently in recital at the Théâtre Municipal de Bastia, France. He has occasionally worked alongside international artists singing roles in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and La Bohème, Kalman’s La Principessa della Czardas, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, Bernstein’s Candide and Verdi’s Rigoletto. In 2007 he performed his first two major opera roles, singing Cimarosa’s one-man opera Il Maestro di Cappella and Papageno in Mozart’s Magic Flute.
Kevin has also sung the baritone solo in Saint-Saëns’ Oratorio de Noël, bass solo in Mozart’s Coronation Mass, and in June 2006 he premièred the baritone role in Carmelo Pace’s cantata Trionfo di Fede. His repertoire includes French and German art song.
Alexander Vella Gregory started his piano and music theory studies at an early age with Dr. D. Buhagiar, and continued furthering his studies with Mro Paul Borg and Mro Laurence Borg. In 2002, he won the Ian Tomlin Napier/Malta Music Scholarship which enabled him to pursue a B.Mus (Hons) degree in composition at the Ian Tomlin School of Music, Napier University, Edinburgh where he graduated in July 2006. He is active both as a composer and as a pianist. He is currently in the process of composing a song cycle for soprano and strings, and music for Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.
First published on 4th May, 2007 by The Malta Council for Culture and the Arts.