“It’s the end of a big year,” Joyce DiDonato observed with a hint of a wry grin, a mere roll of those clear blue eyes. No one thought she was talking about her own career. She’s American. Nothing to add right now. She’s been vocal elsewhere, on the value of cultural politics since Trump, the plight of young refugees in camps in Greece where she performed in the summer, and her new role as ambassador for World Voice, which helps children across the globe learn through singing.
The Kansas-born mezzo-soprano superstar had reached the closing moments of her Wigmore Hall recital on Monday, repeated later in the week. “Tomorrow’s another day, the sun always rises,” she summed up, delighting in cliche, not misquoting Hemingway but paraphrasing the opening line of Richard Strauss’s Morgen! (1894). Rarely flickering above a whisper, ending mid-air, this much-loved song intensified rather than broke the spell that hung over this sensuous, sensual, at times languid programme. Her single encore sent us out into the night on a misty yet melancholy high.
On the opera stage, DiDonato is unafraid of grand gesture and, as required, melodrama. In the intimacy of Wigmore Hall, she shape-shifted to an entirely different persona: equally expressive but now understated, physically restrained, letting a minutely gradated range of vocal colours do the work. This was no standard recital. It did not invite flirtation with the pianist or, in that particular manner of lieder singers, endless caressing of the piano itself. Both were absent. Instead, her musical partner was the Brentano String Quartet.
After Strauss’s five early songs, Op 21, here agreeable as warm-up works of yearning charm, DiDonato and the quartet performed Debussy’s sexy Chansons de Bilitis (1897-8). Originally for female voice and piano, this version for string quartet worked its own voluptuous but restrained magic, allowing DiDonato to unleash a subtle and fantastical range of expression. The imagery and harmonic palette brushes up against Debussy’s opera, Pelléas et Mélisande (1898): hardly surprising given their proximity of composition. The arrangement was made by Jake Heggie, whose song cycle Camille Claudel: Into the Fire (2012) – written for DiDonato – filled the second half of this beautifully constructed programme.
Claudel, a French sculptor, was the oppressed, now we might say abused, lover of Rodin. Struggling to establish her own artistic identity – she set up a workshop with other female artists – she was eventually committed to a psychiatric hospital, dying in an asylum in 1943.
Heggie, whose Dead Man Walking comes to the Barbican on 20 February starring DiDonato, has created a powerful six-song work, giving full rein to Claudel’s tortured feelings, from desire to horror to mental collapse (the text is by Gene Scheer). The rich warmth of DiDonato’s voice soared to the back of Wigmore Hall, while the excellent Brentano Quartet delivered Heggie’s singular brand of melodic semi-minimalism with expert fluency. They also played the one-movement Molto adagio sempre cantante doloroso – “My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death” – by the 17-year-old Guillaume Lekeu (1870-94), a strange but agile work by the scarcely known Belgian who died early of typhoid.
Two events ended the season in chalk-and-cheese festive style. The LPO mixed old and new performance styles in a sprightly account of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, conducted with athletic precision by Vladimir Jurowski and sung by a large but lithe London Philharmonic Choir, with assured soloists led by the tenor Jeremy Ovenden. The six cantatas, intended for individual performance between Christmas Day and Epiphany, call for different instrumental ensembles. Trumpets and drums herald the birth of Christ, pastoral woodwind carol the shepherds in the fields, a pair of horns announce the circumcision. All ends with victory over death and damnation. Special praise to violinists Kevin Lin and Tania Mazzetti, to the nimble, unfussy continuo players and to principal trumpet Paul Beniston. Beniston started his career as a Salvation Army cornet player, which must have meant standing on many a chilly street corner at this time of year.
With all respect, the Christmas Oratorio lacks one ingredient: a conga. It’s the touchstone of Bernstein’s neglected 1953 musical Wonderful Town (history complicated; lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green), performed in concert twice by the LSO and Simon Rattle, wittily directed by the uncredited Gary Brown. I heard the second, on Thursday. A terrific cast, including Nathan Gunn, Duncan Rock, David Butt Philip and Ashley Riches, was led by Alysha Umphress as book-eating Ruth and Danielle de Niese as her fizzing sister Eileen.
Rattle has had this score in his blood since a 1999 EMI recording with BCMG and London Voices directed by Simon Halsey, now supremo of the London Symphony Chorus. (And amid these long loyalties, nice to see Mark Elder grinning in the audience. He staged Wonderful Town with the Hallé and Manchester Royal Exchange in 2012, having been introduced to it by Rattle.) The LSO was amplified with luscious, moody saxophones who, like the brass, made sure every player knew how to swing. Rattle applies the same wild-eyed energy to Broadway as to Birtwistle, or anything else. By the end, cast and half the chorus were conga-ing round the hall. On stage, anarchy reigned with so many musicians wearing big white Rattle wigs you couldn’t tell which was the conductor. More please. Certainly the most zany and joyous event of the year.
Star ratings (out of 5)
Joyce DiDonato ★★★★
Christmas Oratorio ★★★★
Wonderful Town ★★★★★
