Rating: 5/5 Verdict: "American mezzo plays the gender card with elegance and style"
Joyce DiDonato is one dauntless diva. Just two years ago at Covent Garden, she was a spirited Rosina in a wheelchair after breaking a fibula at the beginning of the season.
Diva Divo lets her flaunt the talents that have enabled her to take on what she describes as awealth of characters from young boys to princesses, from ardent young men to demented murderous wives. Swapping between trousers and skirts, the Kansas-born mezzo has come up with a gender-bender recital to remember.
With DiDonato, musical issues are quality assured and each character is perfectly caught, from Cherubino coping with a teenage libido to a more worldly Susanna totally at ease with herself and her sexuality.
Those who first fell under the spell of DiDonato in her 2009 Rossini collection, Colbran, the Muse, will be totally carried away by her deliciously playful music-lesson aria from Il Barbiere di Siviglia.
And Seien wir wieder gut! from Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos provides an inspired conclusion, a paean to music as "the most sacred of all the arts".
Diva Divo moves effectively from aria to aria.
On one track, DiDonato is a lovelorn Siebel lusting after Marguerite in Gounod's Faust; within three minutes, she's the heroine herself, pining for Faust, in a luscious D'amour l'ardente flamme from Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust.
A lyrical outpouring from the same composer's Romeo et Juliette, extolling the joys of love under southern skies segues into a testosterone turn as Romeo himself in Bellini's I Capuletti e i Montecchi. Effortless bel canto is followed by coloratura fireworks when Romeo brandishes his sword at the ill-fated Tybalt.
With the tale of Cinderella, the tender anguish of Massenet's Prince Charming from the French composer's Cendrillon is followed by Cinderella's final aria of forgiveness from Rossini's La Cenerentola, with a romp of a Non piu mesta.
Diva Divo owes much to Kazushi Ono and his Orchestre de l'Opera National de Lyon.
Woodwind playing is particularly shapely, nowhere more so than in the bassett horn obbligato woven around DiDonato's soul-searching account of Vitellia's aria from Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito.
