Here is my Monday February 21 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times review of the Friday February 18, 2011 The University of Chicago Presents recital by American mezzo Joyce DiDinato -- her Chicago recital début.
In recital, mezzo Joyce DiDonato teaches as she trills
BY ANDREW PATNER
From Elly Ameling to Cecilia Bartoli to Dawn Upshaw to Susan Graham, the place in Chicago to hear great singers in recital, and often making débuts, along with Ravinia’s similarly intimate and historic Martin Theatre, long has been The University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall.
On Friday night, American mezzo Joyce DiDonato added her name, triumphantly, to the Hyde Park honor roll before a sold-out house at U of C Presents that included enough young musicians and student fans that you could almost believe that solo vocal performances could be making a comeback.
Originally a music education student at Wichita State University, DiDonato has carefully built an opera and concert performance and recording career that now has her in regular demand at the world’s top companies and houses. Chicago audiences have heard and seen her Rosina in The Barber of Seville and Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro at Lyric Opera, and she has given private song programs here for Classical Action, an AIDS awareness group, and for the faculty retirement of one of her mentors, U. of C. musicologist Philip Gossett.
But this was her first full-scale public recital here, and -- befitting her character, curiosity, individuality, and range both vocally and of interests -- she offered unusual works in Italian and French by known and little-known composers. Threaded with a running commentary both humorous and informative, the evening proved to be both a recital and a seminar in the very best senses.
While operatic Rossini popped up as an encore in a perfect presentation of “Tanti affetti” from La donna del lago -- the best I’ve heard since Marilyn Horne -- the program proper was given over in the main to the composer’s songs as well as those of the neglected Frenchwoman Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944), the Venezuelan-French-Jewish dandy Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947), various lesser Italians, and a scena by Haydn. Easily capable of giving an evening of show-stoppers, DiDonato chose instead to let us hear how she considers and shapes a variety of works.
Rossini also opened the concert’s second half with the Willow Song from his (not Verdi’s) early opera Otello from Shakespeare, but it was presented as Desdemona singing a song, to herself and to us. As with everything DiDonato does, communication -- personal, musical, and emotional -- is more important than theatrics. She’s a natural onstage, in part because you have the feeling that she is never acting.
The mechanics are all there. In both the Haydn Scena di Berenice of 1795 and the Rossini encore from 1819, DiDonato covered the runs of scales, trills, and the dramatic shifts of mood seamlessly but without any sense of “look at me.” Hahn’s suite, Venezia, set and sung in Venetian dialect, had both the singer and her superb and regular French accompanist David Zobel making us feel the ripples of the lagoons on which these works were actually first performed. Each song on the whole program, however obscure, was given its due and had its best case made for it by the pair.
As DiDonato really is from Kansas, I’ll waive the ban on singing Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Of course, she also sang it with such taste, honesty, and simplicity that it worked as a welcome ribbon around the perfect gift box she gave to her audience that night.
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