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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REVIEW:
All of her recital projects are now carefully conceived as pieces of theater in themselves, song choices shrewdly weighed and tested for their collective and accumulative effect. DiDonato and her collaborators here carry the color of voice and string quartet throughout the dramatic arc of the recital. And the highest compliment I can pay all three of the arrangers is that it sounds as if those sounds were conceived and swathed this way all along. Into the Fire is a wonderful calling card for DiDonato. Small wonder she has become something of a muse for its composer.
