More Than a Singer

It’s a nice thing to see—a guy get totally smitten by a woman in twenty minutes or so.

The guy is unknown, though that may change. The woman is famous, although in the rarified world of opera. He’s British; she’s American, from Prairie Village, Kansas. And they come together at a master class, where he is singing, and she is….well, mastering.

Blessedly, she’s nice about it, as a girl from Kansas should be. And so Joyce DiDonato met Nicolas Darmanin in London at the Royal Opera House, and listened as he made his way through a difficult aria of Rossini (right, point taken—are there any easy arias?)

And Darmanin does a good job of it. Then DiDonato gets to work, and at one point asks him why he repeated a phrase; “do you just like the sound of your voice,” she kids him. Well, he doesn’t deny it, and she says, “I just love tenors.”

She’s as sunny as a Kansas sunflower, and also funny. But when she takes a chance, as every teacher learns to do, she opens up a world for Darmanin. First, she prefaces it with a warning—she’s not a voice pedagogue, she doesn’t want to screw him up. But what does he think of his breathing?

In the next ten minutes, she has taken a good tenor and made him substantially better. And in Darmanin’s case, she has focused on technical matters. In another case, she takes on a mezzo, and focuses on character development. Again, she’s totally winning, saying at one point that generic opera is ridiculous. When does it get sublime? When a singer digs deep into his or her character, and really understands the role.

DiDonato, in the words of opera critic Rupert Christiansen, has “a sound so perfectly beautiful – so purely projected, so elegantly shaped, so intensely felt and delicately coloured – that adjectives such as angelic and sublime floated to mind.”

She also is a complete professional—she’s canceled only twice in her life, when her father died. Even more remarkably, she once fell in the first act of an opera, broke her fibula, but carried on through the rest of the evening.

Well, this amazing woman has just performed at the Last Night of the Proms, and has included “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” in her pieces. And so—electronically, though not on stage—she has dedicated the song to all the gay and lesbians who have suffered rejection, and specifically to the Russian LGBT community, who are affected by Putin’s anti-homosexuality laws. Here’s what she wrote on her website:

There are well-intentioned parents, siblings, friends, strangers, communities, schools, as well as governments, that insist on trying to make homosexuals feel like lesser human beings, hoping for their silence, which is seemingly so much easier for their oppressors to bear. “These gays” are much greater human beings for having to look into the eyes of these misguided forces that try with all of their might to degrade them, and yet they audaciously stand up and say, “No. You listen: I am worthy.”  What a courageous, shining example of being true to yourself.  They deserve the applause and celebration for their valiant courage and for teaching us (if we’re strong and brave enough to learn) how to be better human beings.

Underneath the sunny personality, there’s a very sensitive person, a person who has had to struggle with her self worth. And it comes out in the second clip below—when she talks about silencing the self-critic.

It’s been seen 5,800 times on YouTube—but it should be shown to every conservatory student every day throughout their student career.

Thanks, Joyce!