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!
