EIF: Joyce DiDonato and Il Pomo D’oro
Joyce is still in charge!
Joyce DiDonato is in my opinion one of the finest operatic actresses of her generation and is well known to Festival audiences in her visits in recent years. I have been attending her performances over the years at the Royal Opera Covent Garden, and was there on the first night of ‘The Barber of Seville’, when she famously broke her leg in the first act, continued to sing with the aid of a crutch in the second act and did the rest of the run in a wheelchair with her leg in plaster! Joyce is also very committed to social action and change and does a lot of work with prisoners in the US, including getting them to sing. Therefore it was no surprise that at the end of her concert tonight she said how special live music was to her, and to us, and that we should take this difficult time to reflect on what is important in leading our lives.
The concert was titled “Some of my Favourite Things” and for Joyce her favourites at the moment seem to come from deep in the past of opera, right back to the beginning of opera with Monteverdi, Cesti, Ramesh, Handel and Dowland. Some festival goers were disappointed that Joyce did not perform from the repertoire that has made her famous, including Mozart, Rossini or Donizetti, but it seems in the maturity of her career (she is now 52) she has decided to go back to baroque opera.. Her last big operatic triumphs have been Handel’s ‘Agrippina’ at Covent Garden and at the Met, and notably her encore tonight was an aria from ‘Theodora’ which she is going to sing at Covent Garden next January. (I was thinking about going but am discouraged by the prospect of Katie Mitchell directing, after her heavy-handed ‘feminist’ production of ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ obliged Lucia to spend the whole of the final act in a blood-filled bath!)
Joyce came on to the platform resplendent in a long pink dress, in contrast to the sober black of the musicians of Il Pomo d’Oro a specialist baroque chamber orchestra formed in 2012 and establishing a big reputation as a period group, not least with Joyce. She began with a selection from Rossi, Monteverdi and Cesti and she may be 52 but there is no lack of power and control in the voice. She dominated the packed-out big tent - of course with amplification, although you felt that Joyce would have managed without the amplification. Our understanding of the arias was aided by surtitles on the side of the stage, although whether anyone at the rear of the tent could read them without binoculars I doubt. The only song I was not quite sure about was Dowland’s ‘Come Again Sweet Love’ in which I think Joyce gave us a very operatic interpretation, in contrast to the more restrained version by say Janet Baker who treats it as an English love song. However her delivery of arias by Handel, from ‘Giulio Cesare’ and ‘Ariodante’, and from Rameau’s ‘Les Indes Galantes’ was impeccable and impressive and although you can’t very well act these arias on the concert stage Joyce threw herself into it in a big way. Joyce may be changing but she is still in charge!
