Feature
The James Naughtie Interview: Joyce DiDonato
BBC Music Magazine
by James Naughtie
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Whether performing for an audience at a maximum security jail or asking us to pursue our own inner peace, the American mezzo-soprano is always on the look-out for classical music’s humanity.
Picture a dark room in Sing Sing prison in upstate New York, packed with 300 or so hard-boiled inmates, most of them violent criminals – ‘the toughest of the tough.’ Rival gang members are being kept apart by guards, plug-uglies are everywhere and the atmosphere is electric. But they’re listening to a performance of arias by Handel and Rossini.