Joyce DiDonato Songplay
Erato, out now
Some of the most joyous music-making of my life,’ says the redoubtable Joyce DiDonato about this exhilarating album. Her collaboration with pianist Craig Terry, virtuoso trumpeter Charlie Porter and, on three tracks, bandoneon player Lautaro Greco, recorded in California last March, manages the almost impossible: it brings crossover into repute. The very word ‘crossover’ reeks of condescension – a great classical artist being condescending to their public by giving them something they think they might, perhaps, understand. And ‘crossover’ is usually condescending to the material as well, by the artist almost invariably failing to sing it appropriately – like those unidiomatic and awful Plácido Domingo Christmas albums of yesteryear. Now, to clean up the crossover act, Joyce DiDonato and her colleagues take Italian baroque songs and arias used by budding opera singers to burnish their technique and offer often mindblowing performances that, I wager, would bring even the most discerning jazz club audience to their feet. Then she and Terry mix it up a bit, with some more modern stuff, such as blind jazz pianist George Shearing’s Lullaby
Of Birdland, Duke Ellington’s Solitude and, for me best of all, Rodgers and Hart’s With A Song In My Heart. This album deserves to be heard by anyone who admires exceptional singing and instrumental craftsmanship.