Concert Review

WQXR's Best Classical Concerts of 2019

WQXR

Joyce DiDonato: On Dec. 15 at Carnegie Hall, DiDonato delivered an inspired concept for Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise: Normally sung by men, DiDonato portrays the protagonist’s beloved as she reads his journal — each song one of the entries written as he trudges towards self-imposed isolation and death. Having sung Rossini for years, DiDonato gave the music great precision, warmly hugged by Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s rubato-prone pianism. But in the final song — a terrifying hallucination of a broken-down hurdy-gurdy man — the journal book was put away, with DiDonato experiencing it as if seeing the angel of death claiming her beloved. A stroke of genius. It’s available on video replay on Medici TV through March 16.

We need you to make us feel an integral PART of a shared existence through the communal, universal, forgiving language of music, of dance, of poetry and Art – so that we never lose sight of the fact that we are all in this together and that we are all deserving of a life that overflows with immense possibility, improbable beauty and relentless truth.

Joyce DiDonato