Independent podcast: Saimir Pirgu - Features - Classical - The Independent Quality voices will always be a rare and valued commodity. If you add musicality and intelligence and good looks into the equation then you are talking the rarest of the rare. The young Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu falls into that category and is currently set on a career path where, as one New York journalist put it, "the sky's the limit." Just a quick glance at the roster of conductors he has already worked with - Abbado, Muti, Pappano, Jansons, Harnoncourt among them - tells a story; then add the directors - Deborah Warner, Michael Haneke, Woody Allen, Franco Zeffirelli - and you begin to see a pattern: that he is receptive musically and dramatically. Actually his own life story would make a rather good opera: born in the industrial Albanian backwater Elbasan with little or no access to the outside world and only State-sponsored violin lessons to unlock his dormant musicality, it was hearing the original "Three Tenors" concert in Rome that changed his life, found his voice, and sent him to the spiritual home of Opera - Italy - to study. Important competition victories followed and one-on-one mentoring from two of those three tenors, Pavarotti and Domingo. Next year he will play son, Alfredo, to Domingo's Germont in Verdi's "La Traviata," a role that has become something of a calling card for him. When Edward Seckerson met him for this exclusive backstage podcast he had just opened a new Deborah Warner production at Vienna's historic Theater an der Wien. Also in the offing, a new and doubtless lavish Zeffirelli "Don Giovanni" this June and July at the Verona Arena and a hugely enticing pairing with Joyce DiDonato in Bellini's "Capuleti e Montecchi" at the San Francisco Opera in September. Right-click here and click "save target as" to download