“You know, they have proven this, that if you stand in Wonder Woman pose for 30 seconds it actually gives you confidence,” she announces.
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She kneels with them and heckles: “You like brown paper bags? What’s so great about bags?” A quick study, Mimi quickly absorbs what DiDonato wants - more verve, more variety - and it’s like watching a black-and-white image get suffused with color.Įach of the next three singers keeps her talents shut up in a cellar of anxiety, and DiDonato yanks them by turns around the stage while they sing, has them raise and drop their shoulders, straighten their spines, press against her hands, and move as if through water - anything to pry them out of that guarded adolescent slump. I want magic.”ĭiDonato has other kids cluster and screech at Mimi’s feet, then orders her to placate them with words only, no singing.
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I want to feel like you’re making up the words on the spot and you’re finding the melody as you go. “And once you have the song the way you want it, you’re going to get up there and hit the play button and sing it the same way each time. “I know people like you: You learn quickly, you’re smart, you get good grades,” she says. DiDonato grins warmly, then gets down to business, like a Midwestern Mary Poppins. The first victim, Mimi, comes up to the piano with an effortful smile and sings “My Favorite Things,” from The Sound of Music. The kids respond with sympathetic giggles. I was so embarrassed - I think the only reason they gave me a part in the chorus was because they felt so bad for me.” On the third, I open the door to the audition room, and all the cool juniors and seniors are sitting there, and I go”- her eyes bug and her jaw drops, and she utters a startled squeak: “ Oh! I guess I wasn’t supposed to come in costume. “The first day of high school went pretty well: I didn’t fall down. She raided her mother’s closet for a ragged flower girl getup, and had the lyrics down cold. She spent the summer memorizing and drilling “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” from My Fair Lady, as an audition piece. Her newest recording, In War and Peace, an alternately scorching and consoling collection of 17th- and 18th-century arias, comes out on November 4.Īt the moment, though, the rows of blank young faces prompt her to recount the time she desperately wanted a role in the high-school musical, even though she was only a freshman. She’s a Carnegie Hall regular too, giving recitals, conducting master classes for young professionals, headlining an annual workshop and performance with inmates at (of course) Sing Sing. Within a few years of her 2005 Metropolitan Opera debut, she had evolved into house star, and last season she got swooning reviews ( from me, among others) for her performance of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago. To say that DiDonato, who is 47, is at the peak of her career is to do her an injustice: She’s at the peak of almost any singer’s career. I do not trust myself to keep my composure. Maybe the effect will vanish on the way out the door, but I feel sure these girls will remember that feeling of effortlessness, of letting the notes waft through the room on a stream of controlled breath and disciplined joy. She dispenses homilies and epiphanies at a dizzying clip, and by the end of her session, each girl has grown suppler and sings with a truer, stronger voice. “It took me a lot longer to get to Carnegie Hall.” Over the next 90 minutes, I witness her coax real music out of four stiff swans. “If you guys are sitting here, you’re miles ahead of where I was at your age,” she says. DiDonato, a mezzo-soprano who was born in Kansas, seems slightly awed. The kids have gathered in Carnegie Hall’s Resnick Education Wing, where they’re getting some high-level help before they audition for New York’s selective arts-oriented high schools. With a generous grin and a disarming pixie cut, Joyce DiDonato, one of the opera’s reigning divas, pops out in front of a crowd of nervous eighth graders and starts chipping away at their terror.