From the Met to Maximum Security: Joyce DiDonato on a mission to bring opera to the people | Opera

AAmerican mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato apologizes for her bed hair as we speak via Zoom from Tasmania, where she is preparing for a series of concerts to mark her first in Australia. “I’m windswept,” she laughs, patting her signature spiky blonde hair. “I get a week off, which is rare for me.”

Downtime for DiDonato is made even rarer by a busy touring schedule that sees her performing around the world in concerts showcasing her exceptional vocal style, while moving between major roles in classical and contemporary opera. She is a regular with the Metropolitan Opera in New York and has sung in the world’s best opera houses, including La Scala in Milan and Covent Garden in London.

Hobart is a big change of pace, but DiDonato insists she’s just as excited to perform in front of audiences here; She believes people tend to have less cultural baggage in cities that don’t have a strong operatic tradition.

“When you perform in a city like Vienna or London, the audience will often hear your performance through their preferred recording filter,” DiDonato says. “But I like the challenge of singing to people in new or unknown areas. I like to think, at least powerfully, that I’m holding my hand and saying: ‘Come on, it’s beautiful.’ “You’ll be fine.”

Her passion for equal sharing of music has led to her work with prisoners at Sing Sing, a maximum security prison in New York State, where she has been performing and running workshops for a decade, witnessing the transformative power of centuries-old music.

In Australia and New Zealand, DiDonato will perform Les Nuits d’été (Summer Nights), a cycle by French composer Hector Berlioz. “It’s music that’s emotional, beautiful, and instantly recognizable,” DiDonato says. “It has both light and dark, a little bit of humor and then pathos. That’s basically who I am as a performer, so it felt complete.”

Light and shadow are DiDonato’s most important qualities, with a voice noted for its brilliant colours, control and warmth. It allows the singer to inhabit a dizzying array of characters, from Handel’s “gun-blazing” Agrippina to the “soft-toned Virginia Woolf” in Kevin Potts’ The Hours. It’s the kind of stylistic diversity that would make a soprano cry — and DiDonato is the first to say: mezzos have more fun.

“[We] “I literally have to do everything, much more than any other type of voice,” she says. Instead of the doomed lovers or chaste geniuses that sopranos are often pigeonholed into, the mezzo plays “different genders; we play princesses and witches. Then there is the sheer diversity of the music. I span four centuries very regularly.”

This range has been the key to the longevity of DiDonato’s career and the secret to her unbridled enthusiasm for the art form. “I have a huge musical and dramatic appetite and can’t imagine being restricted to a narrower sound type,” she laughs.

While some singers find that their voices emerge naturally in their late teens, DiDonato had to work hard to find her voice, a task that occupied most of her twenties. “I don’t know that my love is my voice,” she says. “It’s not that I don’t love it, but that’s not what charges me. What matters is the expressive power of my voice, and what I say with it.”

“I agree with composers who are primarily emotional storytellers, who are not afraid to write melody.”

Given how contemporary opera tends to be dissonant, to sparse, complex passages over unforgettable arias, this statement seems almost counter-revolutionary. While DiDonato is a passionate and outspoken advocate for opera’s continuing importance, he believes that recent developments in the form have pushed audiences away.

“It seems that opera in America — and perhaps around the world — has lost its way,” she says. “Ticket sales are down, and I feel like there is panic [in the industry]We have to do it He is Related, we have to change. It is as if we have jumped ship from where we are.

From her experience working with prisoners, DiDonato knows how powerful traditional opera is. She has witnessed hardened criminals moved by Handel’s Giulio Cesare, and she knows that opera “puts into the physical world, through vibration, what many of us cannot reach and express verbally. Especially today. We are so restricted. We are so frozen.”

DiDonato sees opera as vital, because “there are very few outlets in our community that really go there. It’s pure presence.” And it has a function. “We must, as individuals and as a community, know who we are today in this world. We do this by putting our thoughts on paper, by putting our hands in the clay, by expressing our confusion, our mystery, our joy, our sadness, our despair.”

“This could happen in Tasmania, it could happen at the Metropolitan Opera, it could happen at Sing Sing Prison. It’s exactly the same experience.”