Published: 24 September 2012
Category: Vocal & Opera

Following the success of her Grammy Award-winning album Diva Divo, Joyce DiDonato will release a brand new record next month on EMI/Virgin Classics. Drama Queens celebrates the high drama and raw emotion of the characters DiDonato embodies on stage – queens, sorceresses, princesses – through a selection of ‘royal arias’ from the world of Baroque opera.

Including works by Handel and Vivaldi but also little-known composers such as Orlandini or Porta, the disc also comprises a variety of styles, from the very beginnings of opera, from Monteverdi to the late-Baroque.

The disc, which was recorded with Il Complesso Barocco and Alan Curtis, will be released in the UK on 1 October.

Intermusica is delighted to be touring Joyce DiDonato in performances of the Drama Queens programme over the next two seasons. DiDonato will be accompanied by Il Complesso Barocco (directed from the violin by Dmitry Sinkovsky) performing repertoire from the new recording. The first tour will commence in November 2012, when Joyce and the orchestra will perform in cities across Germany, Austria and the United States, including concerts at Berlin Konzerthaus and Carnegie Hall, New York.

DiDonato has relished the opportunity to embrace the deep, fiery emotions of these royal protagonists. She explains:

“We singers tend to boast that our careers offer the best form of psychotherapy in existence, for we are allowed to work out the bulk of our inner demons courtesy of the larger-than-life drama queens we encounter on the stage – those divine ladies who weep and love, moan and avenge more grandly and stylishly than in any other art form. On the surface, this therapy is a definite plus in a field fraught with challenges and extreme pressures. However, the real release and joy comes when we add you, the listener, to the mix and we carry out the unspoken pact to travel together to these hidden places we often work so hard to avoid in daily life.

Why do we adore these queens of the drama? The answer, for me, lies at the heart of why we love opera: we yearn to open hidden doors to the richest, most complex, utterly human and profoundly moving emotions that we may not be able to access when left to our own devices. The crazy plots and extreme circumstances of the operatic universe give us permission to unleash our often too-idle imaginations. We willingly enter this world of high drama, praying that we will find a welcome release in Cleopatra’s broken, haunted tears, or that we will be allowed to weep at Rossane’s unbridled joy, or perhaps learn to love a bit more purely through Orontea’s heartfelt plea to her sleeping lover.

The Baroque drama queen apologises for nothing, hides nothing (unless it serves her purpose, of course), lays herself bare without filter, and through glorious, magisterial vocal music gives us permission to dare to do the same. Who needs therapy?”

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