Joyce DiDonato: Summer 2009

After famously soldiering on
after breaking her leg during a performance at London’s Royal Opera House, the
irrepressible mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato continues her summer at some of Europe’s most celebrated
festivals.  Before the opening of Il
barbiere di Siviglia at Covent
Garden, DiDonato sang alongside a starry cast at the Royal Opera’s “soirée
musicale” – among them baritone Thomas Hampson and tenor Joseph Calleja –
accompanied at the piano by Antonio Pappano, the opera company’s music
director.  Among the star
mezzo-soprano’s summer engagements is a surprise appearance at the Salzburg
Festival on August 2, during which she will sing a solo concert of Handel arias
from her recently released EMI recording Furore.

On June 25, London’s Independent newspaper bubbled over with enthusiasm for a “hurriedly prepared concert party” assembled from the
remarkable talent on hand at Covent Garden when Dmitri Hvorostovsky cancelled a
solo recital because of a sudden indisposition.  The new concert offered many excellent contributions and a
preview of DiDonato’s next recording for EMI Classics:

“This hurriedly prepared
concert party felt so deliciously informal and spontaneous and so not ‘last
minute’ that you could only wonder at how such diverse material had been
assembled and prepared with such diligence and at such speed.  The answer, of course, is Antonio
Pappano, whose hands-on stewardship of this house inspires artists to go the
extra distance for him.  It is a
measure of the respect he commands (to say nothing of his persuasiveness) that
Thomas Hampson and Joseph Calleja – performing La traviata the following night –
and Joyce DiDonato, rehearsing The Barber of Seville, gave up their free
time to avert cancellation.

“Who knew, for instance,
that Pappano was such a natural jazzer? 
Here he twinkled and sashayed around Joyce DiDonato as she teased out
the dusky charms of ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ from Kern and Hammerstein’s Show
Boat.  It’s amazing just how much a number like
this has in common with the enticing come-ons of Rossini’s song triptych La
regata veneziana where the sultry Anzoleta offers her own very particular
incentives to her dreamy oarsman.  It
was nothing if not a good warm-up for next week’s Barber.  And there was more Rossini, with
DiDonato limpidly navigating the genteel arabesques of the ‘Willow Song’ from Otello.”

In her reprise Royal Opera
House performances in Rossini’s Barber, which the fearless mezzo performed in a wheelchair, DiDonato appeared
opposite her frequent stage-partner Juan Diego Floréz as Almaviva.  The pair’s performance at the
Metropolitan Opera in the same comedy created international excitement in 2007
as a Met: Live in HD
transmission.  And, in the coming
fall, a DVD of their colorful 2008 performance of Rossini’s Cenerentola at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu is slated for
international release.

Ms. DiDonato’s next big
international festival debut is at Salzburg, where she sings a “Furore” program
of Handel arias to replace colleague Rolando Villazón – an invitation possibly
inspired by her April Vienna State Opera debut in the Barber of Seville, which evidently won over the audience.  It was described in the local press (as
well as by the local correspondent for Opera News) with effulgent praise:

“Ms. DiDonato … tossed off
crystal-clear coloratura, presented a dark, secure low register, a confidently
nuanced mid-range, bright and voluminous high notes – in short, everything that
makes for great, modern, bel canto style. … She appears undaunted by the role’s many
technically tricky passages, and what’s more, she sang musically challenging
variations on every repeated phrase, designed every single bar with brio, and
presented a psychologically multi-faceted characterization with wildly joyful
abandon.”

– Wiener Zeitung

And, from the Opera News report:

“She vamped, camped and cavorted her
way into the Viennese public’s heart.  Ravishing in powder blue, she dazzled the hearer with
interpolations verging on the impossible (I was reminded of Beverly Sills’s
sometimes wild improvisations), highlighted by a stunning trill.  Basically, she blew everyone else off
the stage.”

– Opera News

Joyce DiDonato to make
Salzburg Festival debut

DiDonato’s Salzburg program,
with the Gabrieli Consort and Players conducted by Paul McCreesh, includes a
selection of Handel arias she recorded for her recent Billboard-charting
EMI/Virgin Classics CD Furore, a worldwide bestseller.  She warms up for Salzburg in her return to France’s Festival
of Aix-en-Provence a few days earlier, with Christophe Rousset and his baroque
ensemble, Les Talens Lyriques – the same forces on the Furore disc. 
Two more festival engagements follow: DiDonato performs Haydn’s 1795
solo cantata “Berenice che fai” (Scena di Berenice) – a 13-minute tour-de-force – with Sir Roger
Norrington and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, first in Edinburgh,
where she makes her debut (August 22), and then in her return to London’s BBC
Proms on August 25.

The popular American mezzo’s
first engagement of the new season is another role debut – her second
consecutive season-start in a new Berlioz part – as Marguérite in La
damnation de Faust in concert with
the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev (last fall it was staged
performances of Béatrice et Bénédict with Houston Grand Opera).

The artist’s website is www.joycedidonato.com; her blog is www.yankeediva.blogspot.com.

Joyce DiDonato:
Selected engagements, Summer 2009:

July 27
Aix-en-Provence Festival, France

Furore – concert of Handel arias

Christophe
Rousset / Les Talens Lyriques
August 2
Salzburg, Austria

Salzburg
Festival (debut)
Furore – concert
of Handel arias

Paul
McCreesh / Gabrieli Consort and Players

August 22
Edinburgh, Scotland

Edinburgh
Festival (debut)
Haydn: Scena di BereniceSir Roger
Norrington

Orchestra
of the Age of Enlightenment

August 25
London, UK
BBC PROMS
Haydn: Scena di BereniceSir Roger
Norrington
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

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© 21C Media Group, July 2009