'Best of 2015' highlights
Joyce DiDonato had an extraordinary 2015! Enjoy these calendar year-end features from the press, celebrating her top performances, events, and album releases from this past year. Stay tuned for more exciting news in 2016!
“Music soared in Kansas City in 2015 . . . One of the biggest concerts of the year happened the first day of February. To celebrate its 50th anniversary season, the Harriman-Jewell Series presented Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Florez in a duo recital. The beloved hometown diva and the Peruvian tenor put on a smashing show. One could tell that this was more than a recital for these two opera superstars. Florez was a longtime friend of the founder of the series, Richard Harriman, and DiDonato attended Harriman-Jewell concerts when she was growing up in Prairie Village. She often has talked about the importance of the series in her own musical life. DiDonato and Florez put on a concert of love and celebration that started the new year in the best way possible.” (The Kansas City Star)
Stella di Napoli named one of WOSU Radio’s Favorite Classical Music CD Releases of 2015: “The gorgeous American mezzo sings a program of arias from operas originating in Naples during the first half of the 19th century. Full marks for the beauty of the singing and for the repertoire choices. I’m supposed to know a lot about these things, but who knew there were two operas called Lucia di Lammermoor (Carafa) and La sonnambula, okay Il sonnambulo, the sleepwalker’s a guy, by Valentini. If you buy one vocal album buy this one. Unexplored repertoire and great singing.”
“Rossini’s Donna del Lago, directed by Paul Curran, featured performances over two runs in 2015 that will be hard to top if we should be lucky enough to hear the opera again in future seasons. Joyce DiDonato was more than up to the challenge of carrying the star vehicle, demonstrating in her vocal wizardry why she is this country’s most sought-after mezzo-soprano.” -New York Classical Review’s Top 10 Performances of 2015: La Donna del Lago at The Metropolitan Opera
“Joyce DiDonato and Rufus Wainwright: Is the hot new operatic couple? At least when they’re talking – in a fairly serious evening of operatic discussion at SubCulture on Bleecker Street in December, DiDonato praised small, enterprising groups such as Prototype Opera and LoftOpera for attracting new audiences. Wainwright’s own discovery of opera was a bit less public: “I was thirteen and I would go on and blast Salome and get naked and put pearls around my neck…whatever, that was just me.” -WQXR’s 10 Pivotal Moments in 2015 for Opera and Classical
Joyce and Tony: Live at Wigmore Hall one of ABC Cultural’s picks for Best Releases of 2015
Joyce and Tony: Live at Wigmore Hall – Opera News 10 Best Recitals of 2015: “The ebullient personalities, instinctive musicianship and rock-solid technique of mezzo Joyce DiDonato and pianist Antonio Pappano are amply displayed on this two-CD set.”
OpéraBlog names Joyce DiDonato its Female Singer of the Year
“The Barbican Centre has announced its most successful year to date, with record attendance and box office figures . . . Musical highlights included the Berliner Philharmoniker’s residency; Joyce DiDonato’s artist spotlight . . . In his foreword, managing director Sir Nicholas Kenyon attributed the record figures to ‘a programme that ranges more widely, and has travelled further afield, that ever before’, adding: “The future could not be more exciting.” (Classical Music Magazine)
Dallas Opera’s world premieres: “Starting with the multimedia sensation that was Everest last winter, and continuing up to the gobsmacking season premiere of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s magnificent instant classic Great Scott . . . the Dallas Opera showed the community that the art form is alive and well, and can be as contemporary and relevant as anything Broadway can do.” Dallas Voice Top Events of 2015