This is a big season in London for the American mezzo Joyce DiDonato. On
Saturday she launches the Wigmore Hall’s 2008/9 programme with a song
recital. Two days later, she opens at the Royal Opera House in a role debut:
as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni opposite Simon Keenlyside’s Don. Later, she
returns to Covent Garden, to headline an all-star revival of The Barber of
Seville, with Keenlyside as Figaro, Juan Diego Florez as the Count,
Alessandro Corbelli as Bartolo and Ferruccio Furlanetto as Don Basilio.
If all this were not enough, DiDonato’s first solo album as part of her new
contract with EMI/Virgin Classics is released this autumn. And, as is the
way nowadays for classical artists as well as pop, she is touring the
programme of Handel arias, eye-catchingly entitled Furore.
First things first, though. When we meet in her dressing room at the Paris
Opéra earlier this summer after a performance of Bellini’s The Capulets and
the Montagues — DiDonato was Romeo, Anna Netrebko her Juliet, both singing
fabulously — the singer, who is in her late thirties, is full of enthusiasm
for her Wigmore gig. “I start with three pieces by Vivaldi, a lovely melting
aria, and then a couple of fiery ones,” she says. “After that there is a
group of chansons by Chausson, then some Turina, which I have recorded on my
Spanish album. The second half is all-American — Copland and Gershwin.”
The mix is characteristically eclectic for a singer whose repertoire ranges
from early Italian baroque to American contemporary, although she is often
dubbed a Rossini specialist thanks to her brilliance in virtuoso vocal
writing. So I asked what lies behind her widely divergent choices for the
recital.
“Well, there are a couple of ideas,” she explains. “Number one, I knew it was
the opening of the Wigmore season and talking with John [Gilhooly, the
hall's director], he wanted a festive atmosphere rather than a too
internalised, pensive Liederabend. The last recital I did at the Wigmore was
a lunchtime recital themed around Venice, and this time I wanted to bring a
little of everything I love,” she continues. “The Vivaldi is there to start
a bit operatically, then I adore the Spanish songs, and also the French,
which are quite tricky to get right.”
DiDonato’s surname leads people to believe she is Italian-American, but it is
her married name from her first husband. Her background is Irish-American,
but she is now married to a real Italian, the young conductor Leonardo
Vordoni. They met when she was singing at the Pesaro Rossini Festival and
tied the knot — during a break from a run of Massenet’s Cinderella in Santa
Fe — in a gondola on the mock “Grand Canal” of the Venetian hotel in Las
Vegas, looking up at a painted sky on the ceiling.
The Wigmore recital will be the fourth time she has sung there since she
entered the hall’s Song Competition in 1997 — and it is a measure of her
meteoric rise that she has been invited for a season-opener so quickly.
Already she has established herself as a favourite with her plush, velvety
mezzo and dazzling vocal fireworks, a vocal cross between her compatriot
Frederica von Stade and the Italian Cecilia Bartoli, but with a personality
entirely her own.
“In the song competition, I got to the semi-final round, but it was still an
amazing experience,” she says. “When you first open your mouth on that
stage, you think: ‘Ahhh! I can do anything.’ I did the competition in
between my two years at the Houston Grand Opera studio. I’d had a big first
year there, training and figuring out my voice, and I came to London pretty
much feeling on top of the world. I didn’t expect to get to the final,
but one of the judges kind of dismissed me outright — he didn’t criticise my
German or my repertoire — and just said: ‘Uh, we basically thought you
didn’t have anything to say as an artist.’ It was devastating. I’d just had
a huge success with my first Rossini Cinderella in San Francisco, and I’d
learnt a lot in Houston and things were really starting to go. It sent me
into a bit of spiral for a while.”
But it didn’t put her off the Wigmore Hall. “Well, time gives you some
perspective, and I understood what he was saying, even if I think it could
have been said less harshly. I arrived as a very polished, put together
American singer, I was doing everything as I was coached. But in a way I put
on a ‘costume’ to be a singer. In some respects, it was one of the best
criticisms I’ve had because it made me take a deep look at myself,” she
says. “When I came back in 2003 for my Wigmore debut, it was a big career
moment, an evening recital at one of the world’s most prestigious halls. It
didn’t sell well because I wasn’t a big-name singer. But you know, it’s all
about building slowly. The response I had was very genuine, and that’s what
I love about singing in London, and particularly at the Wigmore Hall.”
I had already encountered DiDonato in the opera house, as Sesto in the
Netherlands Opera’s production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Even though she
was in the second cast — alongside, incidentally, the first Cleopatra of
Danielle de Niese — it was clear that here was a singer with a brilliant
future.
“Those performances planted a lot of seeds for me. That was where William
Christie and Alan Curtis first heard me, as did Alain Lanceron , which has
led, indirectly, to my new disc,” she says.
If in the opera house DiDonato is sometimes regarded as a Rossini diva, on
record she is already established as a leading Handelian. For Curtis she has
appeared in complete recordings of Radamisto and Floridante — and in the
title role of Alcina, yet to be released — while her Dejanira in
Hercules for William Christie is available on DVD. It was this production by Luc
Bondy that led to the EMI/Virgin signing and the new Handel disc of arias
from Giulio Cesare, Ariodante and, of course, Hercules.
“Handel surprised me. Ten years ago, he wasn’t really on a young American
opera singer’s horizons. His operas weren’t a staple of the US repertoires.
Then in 1999, I covered Jennifer Larmore as Ruggiero in Alcina at Lyric
Opera of Chicago and I loved that role. Then I was offered Sesto in Julius
Caesar in Amsterdam. Somehow I had this idea Handel’s music was in a
beautiful silver box and you had to take it out with white gloves and treat
it gently. Then, all of a sudden, I started working with Bill Christie and
Marc Minkowski, and I discovered it was bold and passionate theatre. I
realised Handel is one of the most emotionally deep and demanding of opera
composers.”
Handelians, and lovers of great singing, await the album — and the Barbican
concert on December 13 — with impatience.
