Cover story Joyce DiDonato

Backstage, with ultra- supportive colleagues

As Donna Elvira in Zambello’s Don Giovanni

wants to accomplish vocally and interpretatively, and everything she does has tremendous imagination. Her Handel and Rossini performances create a special anticipation in an audience because her ornamentation is so distinctive, making even a thrice-familiar aria – ‘Una voce poco fa’, for example – seem a totally new experience.” It’s not just DiDonato’s stylistic versatility that defines her success on

stage – it’s her remarkable gifts as a singing actress. She really can play anything, from suffering queens to libidinous young men, from the title- role in Handel’s Ariodante to Sister Helen Prejean in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. No matter whom she is portraying in opera, no matter which song she is savouring in recital, she invests 100 per cent of herself in it. In complete control vocally, she is at the same time so consumed by the character that you forget it’s Joyce DiDonato you’re hearing up on stage. She embodies whomever she’s playing and whatever emotional situation she is evoking. I caught up with the 41-year-old singer recently on a chill winter’s

afternoon backstage at Lyric Opera of Chicago, where she was reprising – perhaps for the last time in her career, she confided – her endearing portrayal of the hormonal page Cherubino in Sir Peter Hall’s famed production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. For this revival the Lyric had assembled a dream cast that included Anne Schwanewilms and Mariusz Kwiecien as the Count and Countess Almaviva, Danielle de Niese as Susanna and Kyle Ketelsen as Figaro: such are the A-list circles in which DiDonato travels these days. It’s a privilege she richly deserves and has amply earned – the old-fashioned way, through good, solid, honest work. Dressed in a V-necked grey sweater, blue jeans with rolled cuffs, and

high boots, her blonde hair pulled back, DiDonato is relaxed and cheery during our interview in a conference room in the Lyric’s administrative suite. Her husband, Italian conductor Leonardo Vordoni, who is sharing podium duty in Figaro with Lyric music director Sir Andrew Davis, offers to fetch us refreshments. After several minutes he returns bearing sandwiches and bottles of diet cola. “You’ll get your tip later,” DiDonato

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tells him, her blue eyes twinkling. The Trieste-born maestro and his wife – they exchanged marriage vows in a gondola at Las Vegas’s Venetian Hotel in 2006 – blow kisses to each other before he leaves us to our conversation. The mezzo-soprano makes clear immediately that she doesn’t draw

great musical or stylistic distinctions in the bel canto repertoire. “When you listen to the Willow scene, ‘Giusto ciel’ from Rossini’s Otello [written in 1816], there is much the same plangent, heartbreaking cantabile that you find 15 years later in Bellini’s music for Adalgisa in Norma,” DiDonato observes. “For me, the basis for singing both Rossini and Bellini – and Handel, too, for that matter – is having a good legato, good language and then expressing the emotion in the music. I think you have a bit more freedom in Bellini with respect to the rubati and things like that. But for me the foundation is essentially the same.” DiDonato’s Rosina in Chicago in 2008 reminded me why she’s

considered the gold standard among today’s Rossini singers. Spunky, funny and lustrous-voiced, she sailed through the elaborate fioritura of “Una voce poco fa” with agility, accuracy, rhythmic point and a mile- wide charm that didn’t have to beg for adoration. You had the sense of a caring artist giving herself to the moment, totally engaged with what she was singing. At no point did she seem to be watching herself perform; at no point did the pleasure she took in engaging the audience descend to prima-donna narcissism. The singer admits it took her a while to lose the self-awareness and,

what’s more, to learn when to hold back. “I got great advice once from the stage director Leonard Foglia when I was singing Sister Helen in Dead Man Walking,” she recalls. “There is a very emotional scene in which I was crying and singing my heart out and acting up a storm. Lenny pulled me aside and said, very discreetly, ‘Joyce, I get everything you are doing. But when I’m sitting out in the audience, I want to decide what your character is feeling – I don’t want you to show me everything.’ It was great advice. If you give everything, there is nothing left for the

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