After two years of online festivals, Esther Lafferty talks to Three Palaces Festival artistic director MICHELLE CASTELLETTI about the upcoming post-pandemic edition.

The Three Palaces Festival is back with a host of live events this November following two years of online relegation due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Spanning 10 days between November 1 and 12 in Valletta, the tenth edition of the festival, taking place in Valletta’s historic palaces and heritage buildings, has music as its focus, with a line-up including early music, contemporary works and some surprises.

“We are so lucky to be able to use these places,” says Michelle Castelletti, the festival’s artistic director.

“It’s all too easy to take their beauty and the history of Malta for granted. However, using these settings for festival events reminds us how wondrous they are, and that our everyday ‘ordinary’ is actually truly extraordinary.”

The venues range from the grand salon of the Auberge de Provence to St John’s Co-Cathedral, St Paul’s Metropolitan Cathedral and the archaeology museum in Valletta.

“I never stop marvelling that we can call these glorious edifices of opulence, splendour and historical significance ‘home’. Through music – from chamber music to opera and more – the festival offers new ways of ‘seeing’ this city through sound,” she says. The artistic director remarked that, this year, the Three Palaces Festival is joining forces with the Early Opera Festival and its artistic director, Kenneth Zammit Tabona, to include two great Handel works, which are being performed in Malta for the first time.

Handel’s opera Partenope HWV27, by the Cappella Neapolitana di Antonio Florio Ensemble at the Manoel Theatre on November 4 and 6, is a flirtatious tale of four suitors who, with typical Italian flourishes, try to win the hand of the mythical Princess Partenope.

In contrast, the composer’s Belshazzar HWV61, to be performed on November 8 and 9 at St John’s Co-Cathedral, is a sombre oratorio performed by Maltese soloists, KorMalta and the Valletta Baroque Ensemble. The protagonist is an anti-hero in the tale of the destruction of the Babylonian kingdom and the eventual liberation of the Jews by Cyrus the Great.

The award-winning ORA singers, best known for their commissioned reflections of Renaissance polyphony, will be performing the music of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis on November 3 by bringing to life the Renaissance and the Golden age of Queen Elizabeth I.

This year, the festival is joining forces with the Early Opera Festival

In that era of religious extremism, these Catholic musicians lived in fear of persecution, yet, through the trust of the Protestant Queen, became England’s greatest composers. The evening will include a special Floral Tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II with a new work by Toby Young on the text of Poet Laureate Simon Armitage honouring Elizabeth II and paying homage to ‘a promise made and kept for life’.

“English choral music is the most extraordinary choral music in the world, and with the setting of St John’s Co-Cathedral, we’re matching splendour with splendour,” says Castelletti.

Marking important moments in Maltese history, performances of the late Maestro Joseph Vella’s oratorios Rewwixta on November 4 and Il-Belt Rebbieħa on November 12 commemorate, respectively, the Maltese revolt against the French (1798-1800), after which the British influence on the island’s history and heritage began, and the Maltese as glorious winners of the 1565 Great Siege.

Other events include a performance by the highly-acclaimed mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah on November 2 with pianist Malcolm Martineau performing, among other works, Zemlinksy, Alma Mahler and Gustav Mahler – the height of the glamour of the fin-de-siècle.

The event also features a pre-concert with Maltese soprano Nicola Said at the Museum of Archaeology performing a song cycle by Richard Strauss.

The festival also includes a trip around the solar system with Holst’s The Planets on November 9 as reimagined in jazz by Duke Ellington and Pete Long with Ronnie Scott’s All Stars, as well as a colourful Czech marionette theatre for a family audience on November 10.

Among the festival highlights is a presentation of the 1920 quintessential German expressionist cult silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari on November 11 at Sir Temi Zammit Hall, University of Malta. “In an interdisciplinary event, we’re projecting an overlay of watercolour wash mapping to immerse the audience within the distorted sets, sinister shadows and unnerving paranoia,” says the artistic director.

In this performance, the film will come to life with UK band Minima and episodic choreography by Francesca Tranter with Maltese dancers.

For more information on these and the rest of the festival live-up, visit here.