Joyce DiDonato

In 1992, a programme for a concert given by Anton Stadler in Riga in March of 1794 was discovered, where he played the Mozart Clarinet Concerto. Amazingly, this programme includes an engraving of the special 'Inventions Klarinette', or basset clarinet, that Stadler had with him to play Mozart’s music. Up until this time, no one knew what the basset clarinet looked like, and it came as a shock to see a long instrument with a bulbous bell on the end. This release on the Glossa label was the first time the work appeared played on an instrument as Stadler possessed.

In this recording Mozart’s music for the clarinet and basset horn is heard in various settings, and all the works are associated with the clarinettist Anton Stadler (1753-1812). The Clarinet Concerto is the composer’s last concerto work, and shows the depth of his mature style. The selections from the opera 'La Clemenza di Tito' date from the same period (1791), representing yet another musical form. Lastly, the two works associated with the Masons, the 'Adagio' and the 'Maurerische Trauermusik', illustrate the quasi-religious underpinnings of the masonic movement expressed through the music’s majestic solemnity.

Listening on the same disc to the marvellous timbres of both Eric Hoeprich’s clarinet and Joyce DiDonato’s voice is a sublime experience.

Crowned with a Grammy Award for her last album, Diva, Divo, Joyce DiDonato joins conductor Alan Curtis and Il complesso barocco for Drama Queens, an electrifying programme of royal arias from the 17th and 18th centuries, composed by figures as famous as Handel and Vivaldi and as little known as Orlandini and Porta. As DiDonato says: “High drama, profound emotion, fearless vocal writing, time-stopping passages, historical significance and real discovery ... What more could I ask for?”

The impact achieved by Joyce DiDonato with her last Virgin Classics album, Diva, Divo, was summed up by her triumph at the 2012 Grammy Awards in February: victor in the Classical Vocal Solo category, the ‘Yankee Diva’ also became the first classical singer to perform live at the Grammy ceremony, receiving a standing ovation for her spectacular rendition of the final rondo from Rossini’s La Cenerentola.

Enterprising as ever, DiDonato now presents a new themed recital, conceived in partnership with Alan Curtis, who also conducted her Virgin Classic recordings of Handel’s Ariodante and Radamisto and her duet recital Amore e Gelosia with Patrizia Ciofi. Drama Queens sees DiDonato portraying a parade of royal personages in a diversity of challenging situations and extreme states of mind.

“For me, this is my most exciting recording project to date,” says Joyce DiDonato,” because it is everything I deeply adore about the world of opera: high drama, profound emotion, fearless vocal writing, time-stopping passages, historical significance and real discovery. What more could I ask for?

“I wanted to return to this genre of music I love so deeply: the free, mysterious, profoundly moving world of Baroque opera, but to do it in the grandest fashion – from the throne of royalty! Each of the characters is a queen (or a sorceress, which equals queen in this fantastical world) ... Well, we have allowed one princess, because the aria is completely unknown and it is simply too beautiful to be left out: ‘Madre diletta, abbracciami’ by Giovanni Porta [c1675-1755].

“What more could a singer ask for than to indulge in the antics of rage and bliss, despair and jubilation, heartbreak and true love?” she continues. “It will be an extraordinary journey, thanks to these larger-than-life characters, and I fully expect to learn a lot about myself along the way.”

Conductor and musicologist Alan Curtis explains that: “Our Drama Queens are a motley group. Our idea was to cultivate extremes, to gather arias that show larger-than-life emotions. They range from noble, but sultry seductiveness, through the hysterically happy to vindictive despair and royal rage. The musical styles are also as varied as possible.”

The arias range in period from the dawn of opera, Monteverdi and Cesti, to lesser-known works by Gluck and Haydn. “We also include some little-known music by Reinhard Keiser [1674-1739], notably an aria with an amazing five-part accompaniment for solo bassoons, without strings,” adds Curtis. (Joyce DiDonato describes it as “an aria of jealousy, suspicion and torment with the bassoon and voice chasing each other.”)

Alan Curtis continues: “Two flashy arias by Giuseppe Orlandini [1676-1760] come from an opera about the great Jewish Queen Berenice, thought to be lost, but found in a California library ... But we have not totally excluded well-known works either. There is Joyce's beloved ‘Sposa son disprezzata’, a YouTube favourite, which most people know in the version for Princess Irene, the rejected bride in Vivaldi's Tamerlano. But it was actually taken by Vivaldi from an earlier opera by Geminiano Giacomelli [1692-1740], where it was sung by a male character and performed by the famous castrato Farinelli. Another Farinelli aria we include comes from an early serenata by Hasse; he sang in drag as one of the greatest drama queens of all time – Cleopatra! And, of course, we include everybody's favourite Cleopatra aria: Handel's ‘Piangerò la sorte mia’, from Giulio Cesare.”

John Wilson and his orchestra have become a regular highlight at the BBC Proms, selling out faster than any other proms and bringing the house down each time. Their second appearance in 2010 was A Celebration of Rodgers & Hammerstein which is recreated on EMI’s second release with the John Wilson Orchestra.

“Cathartic, uplifting and humanizing” wrote the Houston Chronicle, reporting on this Houston Grand Opera production of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. Joyce DiDonato as Sister Helen Prejean, who becomes a counsellor to murderer on death row in Louisiana, shares the stage with her idol, veteran mezzo Frederica von Stade, here making her farewell to opera.

“Joyce DiDonato returns to her New York City Opera role as Sister Helen and her life-changing portrayal proves an absolute revelation,” wrote the Houston Chronicle when the American mezzo soprano assumed the role of the nun Sister Helen Prejean in Jake Heggie’s opera Dead Man Walking, premiered in 2000 in San Francisco and staged with DiDonato at Houston Grand Opera in late 2010.

Like Tim Robbins’ Oscar-winning 1995 movie of the same name, which starred Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, the opera draws on Sister Helen’s real-life memoirs: a leading advocate for abolition of the death penalty in the USA, she acted as a counsellor to a prisoner on death row in Louisiana. “However great an operatic and theatrical experience,” continued the Houston Chronicle, “Dead Man Walking makes its greatest impact as a purely human one.”

As Joyce DiDonato told the New York Times: “I first did Sister Helen at New York City Opera in 2002. It was extraordinary as a young American to be involved in something that so directly reflects things our society is going through. Dead Man Walking poses questions directly applicable to our society today … I’ve never felt a piece hit an audience so hard. There was an electricity in the theatre.”

Quite apart from the power of the opera itself, the production had a special personal significance for DiDonato. Her career was launched in the late 1990s with her three years on Houston Grand Opera’s young artists programme, and in this production she was sharing a stage with her idol, fellow mezzo soprano Frederica von Stade. Playing Mrs de Rocher, the mother of the convicted murderer, von Stade made her farewell to the operatic stage with this production.

“The rafters [shook] …” wrote Opera magazine, “thanks to the ovations for Joyce DiDonato, Philip Cutlip [playing the convicted Joseph De Rocher], the music director Patrick Summers and perhaps especially for Frederica von Stade, whose recreation of the role of the convicted murderer’s grieving mother in this run ended this beloved artist’s 41-year operatic career … DiDonato sang luminously, affectingly conveying the altruistic nun’s conflicting emotions … Von Stade was dramatically and musically heartbreaking in a role written for her, Measha Brueggergosman’s glowing soprano and spunky acting enriched her portrayal of Sister Rose … Summers … was in total sync with Heggie’s churning, throbbing, colourful score … Leonard Foglia’s staging was … chillingly effective.”

To return to the words of the Houston Chronicle: “Absolute in its skill and devastating in its power, Houston Grand Opera’s Dead Man Walking more than lives up to the reputation that this uncompromising and thoroughly engrossing work has acquired since its world premiere at San Francisco Opera a decade ago… Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally have stared unflinchingly into the dark heart of its difficult subject matter. Despite the fact that much of the action is unbearably painful, they find light and transcendence amid that darkness, thanks largely to the ennobling influence of their protagonist. Dead Man Walking wipes you out, yet its final impact is cathartic, uplifting and humanizing. … Heggie and McNally have written the most deeply and genuinely spiritual new work to inhabit either opera or theatre stages in many years.”