American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato apologises for the bed hair as we chat via zoom from Tasmania, where she’s preparing a series of concerts to mark her first time performing in Australia. “I’m windswept”, she laughs as she pats down her signature spiky blond hair. “I’m having a week of vacation, which is rare for me.”
Downtime for DiDonato is made rarer by a punishing touring schedule that sees her perform around the globe in recitals showcasing her extraordinary vocal technique, while juggling major roles in classical and contemporary opera. She’s a regular at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and has sung in the world’s top opera houses, including Milan’s La Scala and Covent Garden in London.
Hobart represents a significant change of pace, but DiDonato insists she’s just as excited to perform to audiences here; she believes people tend to have less cultural baggage in cities without a strong operatic tradition.
“When you perform in a city like Vienna or London, the audience is often listening to your performance through the filter of their favourite recording,” DiDonato says. “But I love the challenge of singing for people where it’s new, or uncharted territory. I like to think that, at least energetically, I’m taking them by the hand and saying: ‘Come, it’s beautiful. You’re gonna be OK.’”
Her egalitarian passion for sharing music has seen her work with inmates at Sing Sing, a maximum security prison in New York state, where she has been performing and running workshops for a decade, and witnessing the transformative power of centuries-old music.
In Australia and New Zealand, DiDonato will be performing Les Nuits d’été (Summer Nights), a song cycle by French composer Hector Berlioz. “It is music that’s immediately emotional, beautiful and identifiable,” DiDonato says. “It has both the light and the dark, a little bit of humour and then the pathos. This is basically who I am as a performer, so it felt complete.”
Light and shade are quintessential DiDonato qualities, in a voice renowned for its exquisite coloratura, its control and warmth. It allows the singer to inhabit a stunning array of characters, from Handel’s “guns-blazing” Agrippina to the “solemnly mellow-toned Virginia Woolf” in Kevin Puts’s The Hours. It’s the kind of stylistic diversity that would make a soprano weep – and DiDonato is the first to say: mezzos have more fun.
“[We] get to do literally everything, far more than any other voice type,” she says. Rather than the doomed lovers or chaste ingenues into which sopranos are often pigeonholed, mezzos “play different genders, we play the princesses and the witches. And then there’s the sheer variety of music. I span four centuries pretty regularly”.
This range has been key to DiDonato’s professional longevity and the secret to her unbridled enthusiasm for the art form. “I have a huge musical and dramatic appetite and I can not imagine being constrained by a more narrow voice type,” she laughs.
While some singers find their voice emerging organically in their late teens, DiDonato had to work hard to locate hers, a task that occupied most of her 20s. “I don’t know that my love is my voice. It’s not that I don’t love it, but that’s not the thing that charges me. It’s the expressive potential of my voice, what I say with it, that matters,” she says.
“I align with composers that are first of all emotional storytellers, and that are not afraid to write a melody.”
Given how much contemporary opera leans into atonality, into sparse and complex soundscapes over memorable arias, this statement feels almost counter-revolutionary. And while a passionate and vocal advocate for opera’s continuing relevance, DiDonato believes recent developments in the form have pushed audiences away.
“It feels like, in America – and maybe worldwide – opera has lost its way,” she says. “Ticket sales went down, and I feel like there was this panic [in the industry], that we’ve got to be relevant, we have to change. And it’s almost as if we jumped ship from who we are.”
From her experiences working with prisoners, DiDonato knows how powerful traditional opera can be. She has witnessed hardened criminals moved by Handel’s Giulio Cesare, and knows that opera “puts into the physical realm, through vibration, what many of us have no access to verbalise and express. Especially today. We’re so blocked. We’re so frozen.”
Opera is vital, DiDonato argues, because “there are so few outlets in our society that really go there. It’s pure presence.” And it has a function. “We must, as individuals and a society, figure out who we are today in this world. And we do that by putting thoughts on paper, by putting our hands in clay, by vocalising and expressing our confusion, our mystery, our joy, our sorrow, our despair.”
“And that can happen in Tasmania, that can happen at the Metropolitan Opera, that can happen in Sing Sing prison. It’s the exact same experience.”
Joyce DiDonato performs with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra on 15 November at Federation Concert Hall, Hobart; the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on 20 and 22 November at Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne; and New Zealand Symphony Orchestra on 28 November in Wellington and 29 November in Auckland.
