Summer 2025
Joyce DiDonato
by Marina Harss
DiDonato makes her Festival Napa Valley debut July 11, headlining Uytengsu Family Opening Night. Among the works she will be performing is a new orchestral arrangement by celebrated composer Gordon Getty.
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The Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is not just one of the top operatic singers in the world — she is a force of nature. A glance at her singing schedule is enough to give anyone an instant case of vertigo. Yet, during a recent call from Athens, where she was preparing to perform a program of arias connected to the theme of love (she had been in Madrid the day before), DiDonato was fully present and focused, as if nothing else mattered.
DiDonato moves effortlessly between international tours of her recital programs, opera productions at the world’s leading houses, and transformative masterclasses, which one journalist described as “equal to any night at the opera.” She is a fierce champion of new music, forging deep creative partnerships with some of today’s most important composers. She frequently collaborates with Jake Heggie — she was radiant in his celebrated song cycle Camille Claudel: Into the Fire and starred as Sister Helen Prejean in Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, one of the most widely performed new operas of the last 20 years.
Joyce DiDonato recently joined forces with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts to create a solo song cycle based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Emily — No Prisoner Be. Written in collaboration with the genre-defying string trio Time for Three, the work will have its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2026.
“It has been one of the most thrilling undertakings of my life,” ~ Joyce DiDonato
In 2022, she was riveting as the character of Virginia Woolf in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Hours by Puts. And she will return to the Met next season to perform the lead in Innocence by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.
She approaches every endeavor — from intimate recitals to grand operatic roles — with the same intensity and generosity of spirit. “I find it such a privilege to have an audience come and put their spirit in my hands for a couple of hours,” she says. “I take that very seriously.”
DiDonato makes her Festival Napa Valley debut July 11, headlining Uytengsu Family Opening Night. Among the works she will be performing is a new orchestral arrangement by celebrated composer Gordon Getty. While it’s her first appearance at the Festival, DiDonato is no stranger to Northern California — she has regularly performed on Bay Area stages throughout her career and has recorded two albums at Skywalker Ranch, the famed creative retreat and production facility in nearby Marin County.
“It’s just an extraordinary place to be creative and surrounded by quiet and calm,”
As ever, her program Opening Night is thoughtfully chosen, featuring works that speak to joy and, in her words, “go right to the heart of the human experience.” Experiencing such music, she adds, “is like eating a great piece of fruit. We absorb it in every cell.”