Review: Joyce DiDonato’s masterclass at Carnegie Hall

When you search YouTube for “Master Class” videos, you’ll come across unexpected instructors like Natalie Portman, Margaret Atwood, Neil DeGrasse Tyson – and even Kris Jenner. Masterclasses were traditionally seen as public pedagogy in which experts, usually musicians, instructed promising newcomers in front of an audience. Although the term has been adopted by the so-called streaming service that offers online “lessons” in many areas, the long tradition of the best classical singers offering intense, detailed public lessons continues, and earlier this month Joyce Didonato once again conducted her revered annual series the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall and aptly demonstrated why she should be seen as the current reigning mistress of the masterclass.

Superstar singers from Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti to Joan Sutherland and Leontine Price coaching young artists (often at Juilliard) have proven to be a popular attraction allowing avid fans to witness another facet of their favorite singers’ artistry, but these events are not without controversy. Some critics argue that masterclasses, because of their public nature, function solely as fleeting, superficial exercises designed to feed the ego of the “master” and have little lasting value for young artists. How much can really be accomplished in the short time allotted to each novice Mimi or Don Giovanni (often only twenty to thirty minutes)?

The great German soprano Lotte Lehmann retired to California, where she became known for her teaching and produced such notables as Marilyn Horne and Grace Bumbry. A number of her master classes have been preserved on video, including one from 1961, in which the 73-year-old Lehmann works with a young soprano on a song by Hugo Wolf. In the clip, Lehmann pays more attention to addressing her audience than to instructing the singer. Her efforts mainly consist of taking to the piano and performing it her way.

It is difficult to imagine what Lehmann’s student thought about the famous diva’s methodology, but Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, another notable interpreter of German songs, often led master classes that left her students demoralized by her barrage of harsh criticism. Renée Fleming, whose own intensely detailed masterclasses have been praised as sympathetic and helpful, has noted how demanding and stressful Schwarzkopf’s classes had been when she took them in the early 1980s.

The first time I attended a masterclass was decades ago at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, where the legendary Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström was a guest. Instead of the usual strategy of having her work one-on-one with multiple students, she led a group of four through much of the second act of Mozart’s opera. Le Nozze di Figaro. Her sharp, good-humored interaction with the singers was full of smart tips on the most effective way to communicate and present their characters to an audience. I expect that these young performers, like me, will never forget her wise and gracious insights.

Typically, lessons such as those from Lehmann or Schwarzkopf will focus on the interpretation of a particular aria or song, although they may also delve into the way a person produces their sound. I understand that the visiting star occasionally makes sharp criticism of an artist’s technique, which can lead to conflict between the singer and his voice teacher.

In important ways, the series that Maria Callas gave at Juilliard in 1971 and 1972 have become iconic for opera master classes. They were the subject of a book by John Ardoin, and pirated recordings – all forty-six hours of the twenty-three sessions – were self-released on CD-ROM. From those recordings, EMI has put together a commercial three-CD set with excerpts from which you might have wrongly assumed that the semi-retired diva only coached arias that she sang herself, while the company followed the traces of her sessions with recordings of the soprano who sang the arias. she had just coached.

Playwright Terrence Mcnally took Callas’ Juilliard period a step further by creating his Masterclass, a play in which a composition of it is dramatized. It opened in 1995 and ran for over a year with Zoe Caldwell, then Dixie Carter and finally Patti LuPone playing the diva as a fire-breathing stand-up comedienne.

Those who know the piece will have had a very distorted view of how masterclasses work. Callas worked seriously with the singers, occasionally demonstrating points herself rather than lecturing the audience about her past and philosophy of performance.

Faye Dunaway had long planned to make a film of McNally’s Masterclass, but that project fell through. However, Angelina Jolie managed to embody the legendary Callas for Pablo Larrain’s new elegiac film Marywhich will be released on Netflix in early December.

In the two October sessions of DiDonato that I attended, which were streamed live worldwide on medici.tv, the mezzo worked intensively with just four singers. It was clear from her comments that the public afternoon sessions had been preceded by private morning sessions, which focused mainly on technical matters. During the Saturday afternoon session, however, DiDonato worked intensively with Canadian soprano Bridget Esler, not so much on interpretation as on accurately articulating defiantly fast coloratura passages in one of Dalinda’s arias from Handel’s Ariodante. Time and again, she walked Esler through the music, making sure every note sounded clear, trying to avoid the smeared, flowery singing often found in Baroque music. To achieve this, Esler took the lines very slowly at first, neatly attacking each note of the run and then gradually increasing the tempo. DiDonato gave her (and many in the audience there and at home) a meticulously detailed solution to an important problem.

One of the most thought-provoking interactions occurred during her encounters with bass Robert Ellsworth Feng. After he sang a particularly mean aria, she suggested that as bass he will often sing bad guys, but he should try to avoid the expected, a common theme of her comments. She showed how a singer must always go beyond the audience’s obvious expectations and dig deep into the lyrics and music to find the greatest variety of colors to flesh out this villain or that tormented heroine.

This in-depth reading of the sung texts also emerged during the collaboration with tenor Ben Reisinger, who performed Pinkerton’s regrettable aria “Addio fiorito asil” from the final act of Puccini’s opera. Mrs. Butterfly. All present agreed that Pinkerton had to be one of the opera’s worst boys for his callous treatment of the young and vulnerable Cio-Cio-San. After his resounding, if lackluster, first run through of the aria, DiDonato examined and interrogated him, and together they looked intently at the words and notes and soon discovered a more complex and nuanced arc in the music that made all the difference when he played the aria repeated. short aria.

One imagines that those three intense days of working closely with DiDonato will indeed have a lasting impact on her four recruits, including Filipino mezzo Michelle Mariposa, whose lush voice shows promise, but whose interpretive skills clearly benefited from the increasing sophistication that the senior mezzo led. her to.

During the two sessions I attended in the Resnick Education Wing, DiDonato’s warmly empathetic manner cleverly balanced her comments to the singers and the audience. While it was always clear that these classes were performances for the hundreds watching there or at home (whether live or as archived online sessions), her focus was firmly on the singers whose repertoire rarely intersected with DiDonato’s.

Before DiDonato returns, Carnegie Hall will continue its commitment to developing young artists in January when the SongStudio series returns. Its history began with the activities of the Marilyn Horne Foundation, and when Horne stepped back, Fleming took over. The project hosts masterclasses of singers and, unusually, accompanists in Zankel Hall, culminating in a Young Artists recital. Fleming recently stepped down from her duties and the 2025 edition will be led by Anthony Roth Costanzo, with participants to be announced soon.