Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato has used her third Virgin/EMI solo album to pursue a relatively unique characteristic of her repertoire. With the provocative title Diva, Divo the album allows her to contrast many of her “trouser” roles with those of passionate heroines. She pushes the envelope further by offering pairs of selections based on a single narrative interpreted by different composers, each of which obliges her to assume a different gender. In one instance, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, she even switches gender within a single opera, taking the role of Susanna on one track and Cherubino (also represented in the opera Chérubin by Jules Massenet) in another.
While this project looks very good on paper (and in DiDonato's publicity photographs), there arises the difficulty that the selected composers do not always make a particularly satisfying mix. Furthermore, when it comes to “mixing” the balances in any given selection, either her conductor (Kazushi Ono leading the Orchestra et Chœur de l’Opéra National de Lyon) or producer (Daniel Zalay) had different “comfort zones” for different composers. Thus, whether she was singing Susanna (“Deh vieni, non tardar”) or Cherubino (“Voi che sapete”) in Mozart’s Figaro, the “secret sauce” of interplay between voice, winds, and strings, which Mozart cooks up with such expertise, seems to have gotten lost in the recording process. Far more effective was the treatment of Hector Berlioz, particularly in Marguerite’s “D’amour l’ardente flamme,” from La Damnation de Faust, whose “ardent” orchestral colors blend compellingly with the yearning eroticism of DiDonato’s delivery of the vocal line. The result pretty much overwhelms her portrayal of Siébel (“Faites-lui mes aveux”) in Charles Gounod’s Faust on the preceding track. For any of these shortcomings, however, the project is still an admirable one; and, if some of the performances do not rise as high as the others, the CD, taken as a whole, provides a wealth of opportunities to think about the characters DiDonato is portraying from new perspectives.
Meanwhile, DiDonato has a busy performing schedule before her. This coming Saturday (February 5) she will give her final performance of Sister Helen Prejean in the current run of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking by the Houston Grand Opera. She then begins an eight-city United States recital tour, accompanied by pianist David Zobel, concluding with her main-stage Carnegie Hall recital debut.
The highlight of the Carnegie Hall recital will be the world premiere of Heggie’s new song suite The Breaking Waves. The mezzo’s main tour program consists of Joseph Haydn’s Scena di Berenice, the aria “Assisa appiè d’un salice” (the “willow song”) from Gioachino Rossini’s Otello, and songs by Rossini and French composer Cécile Chaminade. Varying the rest of the program from city to city, DiDonato will also blend in Italian rarities by Ruggero Leoncavallo, Arturo Buzzi-Peccia, and Vincenzo Di Chiara, as well as songs by Reynaldo Hahn. The schedule for the tour is as follows:
- February 8, Fort Worth, Texas, Bass Recital Hall
- February 11, Santa Monica, California, Broad Stage Recital Series
- February 13, Kansas City, Missouri (DiDonato’s hometown), Harriman-Jewell Recital Series
- February 15, Washington, D. C., Vocal Arts Society
- February 18, Chicago, Illinois, The University of Chicago
- February 20, Atlanta, Georgia, Spivey Hall
- February 28, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Perelman Theater
- March 6, New York, New York, Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall
Further in the near future, DiDonato will be making two role debuts at the Metropolitan Opera. The first will be on March 24, when she gives her first performance as Isolier in Rossini’s Le comte Ory (in a production that will receive a Live in HD broadcast to movie theaters on April 9). Then on May 7 she will give her first performance at the Met as the composer in Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, one of the roles covered in her Diva, Divo CD.
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