Voice of Joyce

Multi-Grammy Award winner Joyce DiDonato wooed in her Santa Barbara debut at the Granada.

The mezzo-soprano flew in from New York, where she started a new production of Massanet’s Cendrillon at the Met just 72 hours earlier, specially for the UCSB Arts & Lectures recital, and returned to the Big Apple to be back at Lincoln Center just 48 hours later. 

Kicking off the widely anticipated concert with Pablo Luna’s work De Espana vengo, she suddenly stopped her pianist Craig Terry, a Music Academy of the West graduate, and admitted she’d got “completely lost.”

But the performance went on without further ado with works by Ravel, Massanet, Granados, Antiche, and Rossini, with the undoubted highlight being the charismatic singer’s rendition of Handel’s Lascia ch’io pianga – “Let Me Weep” – from the opera Rinaldo, who she said was her favorite composer.

DiDonato delighted the sold-out audience with two encores: Irving Berlin’s I Love a Piano and Over the Rainbow, in honor of her hometown in Kansas.