Rejoyce: The Best of Joyce DiDonato (CD review)

Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano. Erato 5099993412124 (2-disc set).

It seems like just a few years ago that American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato was a young, upcoming opera singer. That was well over a decade ago, and she’s already issuing a “best of” album. I suppose that shows my age and how fast time flies. Here, we have a collection of thirty-one selections recorded over a ten-year span and spread over two discs, with half of dozen of the numbers newly recorded (2013).

As I’ve said before, I know next to nothing about opera, despite my having heard a ton of it live and on record over the years. For my taste, most operas are too long, too slow, and too melodramatic for my limited attention span. That said, it’s hard not to like the best operas and doubly hard to resist a good operatic singer like Ms. DiDonato. While most young tenors and sopranos seem to disappear from view after their first performance or two, Ms. DiDonato is one of the survivors, a woman who has proved her worth over the past decade or so, becoming one of the world’s truly great singers. Gramophone magazine awarded her “Artist of the Year” status in 2010, and she won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Solo in 2012.

Although Ms. DiDonato began early on in her career specializing in vocal music of the Baroque and Classical periods--Handel, Mozart, Rossini--she has expanded her repertoire since then, and the present collection additionally contains works by Bellini, Berlioz, Richard Strauss, even Rogers & Hammerstein and Arlen & Harburg.

Ms. DiDonato possesses a robust lyric-coloratura, mezzo-soprano voice, with a good deal of control and flexibility, which she amply demonstrates on the many tracks offered here. Whether the situation demands a display of love, pain, joy, anger, or sorrow, Ms. DiDonato is ready with the appropriate vocal gesture in a tone so pure, it kept even this non-opera fan in rapt attention. In short, she is able to do almost anything with her voice, exhibiting a remarkably wide vocal and emotional range.

I won’t try to list all thirty-one operatic arias and popular songs in the album, but I will tell you the composers involved, the accompanying orchestras and conductors, and a few of my own favorite numbers. The music comes from the pens of Handel, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Porta, Orlandini, Giacomelli, Mozart, Gluck, Rossini, Bellini, Berlioz, Richard Strauss, Heggie, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and Arlen & Harburg. Providing the accompaniment are Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco, Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques, Emmanuelle Haim and Le Concert d’Astree, Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante, Kazushi Ono and the Orchestre de l’Opera National de Lyon, Yannick Nezel-Seguin and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Edoardo Muller and Antonio Pappano with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia-Rome, Patrick Summers and the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra, John Wilson and the John Wilson Orchestra, and Michael Stern and the Kansas City Symphony. That’s quite a supporting cast.

Among my favorites, I liked Handel's "Ombra mai fu," of course, a part of which you can hear below. It amply demonstrates Ms. DiDonato's rich timbre and ability to adapt to almost any part. I enjoyed Handel's "Crude furie degl'oridi abissi" not only for the virtuosic nature of DiDonato's voice but for the greater dimensionality of the orchestra behind her. Vivaldi's "Non saria pena la mia" and Orlandini's "Col versar, barbaro, il sangue" show off the singer's gymnastic pliability; Mozart's "Voi che sapete" and "Aprite, presto aprite" display her lighter side.

But trying to find favorites among favorites is a thankless and futile task. Still, I think it was her Mozart and Rossini I enjoyed most. Runners-up, though, include her excursions into Broadway and movies with selections like "You'll Never Walk Alone" from Carousel, “Climb Ev'ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music, and "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz. As I've said, she appears able to do anything, and I confess to shivers of delight with "Over the Rainbow."

Now, I’m sorry if I seem a little vague about who’s recording and releasing what these days, but here we have an Erato/Warner Classics release of recordings made between 2004 and 2013 by EMI, Virgin Classics, and Erato. I think the answer to who and what lies in the fact that Universal Music Group bought EMI in 2012 and subsequently sold the Parlophone Label Group, including EMI Classics and Virgin Classics, to the Warner Music Group. Then Warner announced that they would absorb the EMI Classics artist roster and catalogue into their Warner Classics label, and Erato Records would absorb Virgin Classics. So, I suppose we can look forward in coming years to a ton of old EMI and Virgin material re-released under the Warner or Erato labels. That it will thoroughly confuse the classical-buying public seems a mere afterthought.

Anyway, the sound understandably varies a little from one track to the next due to the time span covered, the different venues, and the number of ensembles involved. However, there is a surprising uniformity among them, all of it miked somewhat closely and sounding slightly “pop” as opposed to most full-scale opera recordings. Most of the items are studio productions, but at least three of them, with the Houston Grand Opera and the Kansas City Symphony, are live recordings and don't sound quite as good as the rest. The voice throughout is often close, very well focused, well defined, with clear but occasionally one-dimensional ensemble accompaniment (although this, too, varies, and the best tracks display a good deal of orchestral depth).

To listen to a brief excerpt from this album, click here:

JJP