Joyce DiDonato

Joyce DiDonato – Wagner: Wesendonck Lieder (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 20:38 minutes | 334 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics

For this recording of Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder, Joyce DiDonato is joined by the original instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro and Maxim Emelyanychev. “Bring that innocent, childlike sense of wonder to your craft, and do whatever you need to find that truth again. It will continually teach you how to be present, how to be alive, and how to let go. Therein lies not only your artistic freedom, but your personal freedom as well!”

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Joyce DiDonato – Wagner Wesendonck Lieder (2023) [24Bit-96kHz] FLAC [PMEDIA] ⭐️
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 00:20:38 minutes | 334 MB | Genre: Classique
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover

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Joyce DiDonato – EDEN (Deluxe Edition) (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:16:21 minutes | 1,26 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics

Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato describes EDEN as “an invitation to return to our roots…an overture to contemplate the sheer perfection of the world around us, and to explore whether or not we are connecting as profoundly as we can to the pure essence of our being.” Most of the song texts refer to nature, giving the album a vaguely environmentalist tinge. As a basis for musical exploration, it all seems so general that it would be of little use. Yet this is DiDonato’s genius. She has a real gift for bringing together musical materials in the most unexpected ways, and she does so with special intensity here. The program gets underway with Ives’ The Unanswered Question (DiDonato indicates that the pandemic has filled her above all with questions), and its solo part is sung, not played by a trumpet. How does DiDonato get from there to Biagio Marini and Josef Mysliveček (she gleefully moves from very familiar pieces to ones that are all but unknown)? Listen and learn. There is new music and music from the early 17th century, the Baroque, the Classical period, Wagner, Mahler, and it all seems a single gesture. Part of her method is to set the motor rhythms of the music of earlier eras against the greater flexibility of the later pieces. DiDonato poses great challenges with all this to the small chamber orchestra Il Pomo d’Oro under conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, and they step up to those challenges admirably. The sound from the Teatro Comunale di Lonigo opera house in Italy is ideal. It may be that, after all, DiDonato achieves her lofty goals here; at the very least, this is a vocal-orchestral recital with greater variety than anything else one is likely to hear these days in the genre, and it is good to see that her adventurousness has been rewarded with commercial success.
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Joyce DiDonato – Songplay (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:47 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics

Joyce DiDonato greets you with a song in her heart and twinkle in her eye. The American mezzo-soprano’s album Songplay unites world-class musicians from the varied worlds of opera, jazz and tango in the pure pleasure of improvisation, experimentation and exchange. Together they create their own musical language, surprising listeners with timeless melodies transformed and universal stories retold over centuries; songs in English, in Italian and – naturally – in the universal language of music.
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Joyce DiDonato – Schubert: Winterreise (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:23 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics

From the perspective of lost love: Joyce DiDonato sings Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise. The world-famous mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and the conductor, and Pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin, take one of the most brilliant song cycles ever written: Schubert’s winter journey. However, the American mezzo-soprano casts a different light on this beloved cycle of 24 songs, telling their story from the perspective of the woman, the lost love. The paper Town Topics (Princeton) writes about DiDonato’s interpretation: “The question of what happened to the woman who sent the narrator on an agonizing journey was not answered in the Wilhelm Müller poem from which Schubert drew the text. On stage, DiDonato created a scenario of being this woman, reading from the narrator’s diary and responding to the inherent despair“.
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Joyce DiDonato – Joyce and Tony – Live at Wigmore Hall (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:34:34 minutes | 1,38 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Erato – Warner Classics

Something about the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato makes British audiences roll over and put their paws in the air, and this frothy but enjoyable recital gives additional indications about what it is. The album is taken from a pair of live recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall, and the Erato label deserves credit for a sound environment that captures the relaxed quality of the events. Simply, DiDonato has the confidence to master whatever she tackles, and it’s infectious. Known for muscular pieces like the little-known Haydn scene that opens the program, she shifts easily to semi-popular and popular songs as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The songs of composer Francesco Santoliquido, one click toward art song from what is usually understood by the term “Neapolitan song” (although Santoliquido was from Naples), are rarely performed, but DiDonato and her accompanist “Tony” (Antonio Pappano) are pitch-perfect in their lightly affecting quality. The second CD of the double set (and presumably the second recital of the original pair) is devoted to American song, from Stephen Foster to songs reflecting DiDonato’s Irish heritage (despite the surname), and here again clarity, humor (from both musicians), and a relaxed quality are the watchwords. A superior light recital.
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Joyce DiDonato – Into the Fire (Live) (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:38 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics

Recorded live at London’s celebrated Wigmore Hall, this captivating recital by Joyce DiDonato and the Brentano Quartet was conceived around Jake Heggie’s song cycle Camille Claudel: Into the Fire, a work written for DiDonato – she describes it as “one of most moving projects I’ve ever been part of”. Songs by Debussy and Strauss and a quartet movement by Guillaume Lekeu complete the programme, which prompted the Financial Times to write that “the beauty and range” of DiDonato’s singing “are surely now at their impressive peak.”
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Joyce DiDonato – In War & Peace: Harmony through Music (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:19:09 minutes | 1,36 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Erato – Warner Classics

“Perhaps my most personal project to date,” is how American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato describes In War and Peace: Harmony through Music. Her ambitions for this collection of arias from Baroque operas are substantial. Surrounded as we are by instability, she hopes it will help us find an answer to a vitally important question: “In the midst of chaos, how do you find peace?”

Her aim is to “steer conversation and discourse … to help all of us find peace in our lives in a dynamic way … As I have tried to convey in this selection of music, the power to bravely tip the scales towards peace lies firmly within every single one of us.”

In War and Peace: Harmony through Music was recorded with Il Pomo d’Oro under its principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. The programme comprises 15 arias divided into two sections: ‘War’ and ‘Peace’. Both contain music by Purcell and Handel – including, to close ‘War’, Dido’s dignified, but searing lament from Dido and Aeneas and Almirena’s haunting and heartbreaking ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from Rinaldo. An excerpt from Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse is included in ‘Peace’, which concludes with Cleopatra’s spirited and defiantly optimistic ‘Da tempeste il legno infranto’ from Giulio Cesare. A further aria from Giulio Cesare is the bonus track for the album; it is Sesto’s touching apostrophe to hope, ‘Cara speme’, which Joyce DiDonato sings unforgettably on a floating whisper of breath.

With 20 concerts in 12 countries between November 2016 and June 2017, Joyce DiDonato and Il Pomo d’Oro will bring alive the message of In War and Peace: Harmony through Music. In November they will be in Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Austria, Finland and Canada; in December in the USA; in May in France and Germany, and in June in Spain, Ireland and the Czech Republic.
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Joyce DiDonato – Handel: Agrippina (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 03:50:22 minutes | 2,25 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Warner Classics

The American mezzo sings the title role of the scheming Roman matriarch in a starrily-cast recording of Handel’s early opera with Il Pomo d’Oro, conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev.
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Joyce DiDonato – Drama Queens (2012/2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:17 minutes | 1,34 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Classics

GRAMMY® Award-winning mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato joins conductor Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco for this electrifying program of royal arias from the 17th and 18th century. It features compositions by luminary figures including Handel and Vivaldi, as well as, lesser-known composers including Orlandini and Porta. Her previous album for Virgin Classics, Diva, Divo, won a GRAMMY® Award in February 2012. DiDonato calls this themed recital her “most exciting recording project to date…high drama, profound emotion, fearless vocal writing, time-stopping passages, historical significance and real discovery.”
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