Kansas-born Joyce DiDonato, a multiple Grammy Award winner and the 2018 Olivier Award winner for Best Opera Performance, captivates audiences around the world and has been hailed by The New Yorker as “perhaps the most potent female singer of her generation.” With a voice “nothing less than 24-carat gold,” according to The Times, Joyce has risen to the top of the industry as a performer, producer, and fierce advocate for the arts. With a repertoire spanning more than four centuries, a varied and acclaimed discography, and industry-leading projects, her artistry has defined what it means to be a singer in the 21st century.
Joyce begins her ambitious 2023-24 season opening the Metropolitan Opera season performing her signature role of Sister Helen in a new production of Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie, to which she will return later to revive her acclaimed “Virginia Woolf” in The Hours by Kevin Puts. This season Joyce will also participate in the Dido & Aeneas tour with Il Pomo d’Oro, and other tours of EDEN and SONGPLAY, a Grammy winner, through Asia, South America, and Europe. In concert, Joyce performs with the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra, her hometown, in a series of subscription concerts, as well as in Istanbul, Strasbourg, and Paris. Joyce also performs in recital at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin, the Wiener Musikverein, and Carnegie Hall.
She recently premiered Tod Machover’s Overstory Overture in the role of Patricia Westertord at Alice Tully Hall in New York and at the Seoul Arts Center in South Korea, and held a residency at Musikkollegium Winterthur. Joyce’s innovative EDEN Tour has garnered further success with recent tours of Europe and North America. In June 2022, Joyce joined the Metropolitan Orchestra for a tour that included the orchestra’s first visit to the United Kingdom in more than 20 years, with performances at The Barbican, Philharmonie de Paris, and Festpielhaus Baden-Baden. Her performance was “the embodiment of musical perfection,” according to the Wochenglatt Reporter.
In opera, Joyce’s recent roles include Agrippina at the Metropolitan Opera and in a new production at the Royal Opera House, Didon in Les Troyens at the Wiener Staatsoper; the title role in Cendrillon and Adalgisa in Norma at the Metropolitan Opera; Agrippina in concert with Il Pomo d’Oro under the direction of Maxim Emelyanchev; Sister Helen in Dead Man Walking at the Teatro Real in Madrid and the Barbican Centre in London; Semiramide at the Bavarian State Opera and the Royal Opera House, and Charlotte in Werther at the Royal Opera House.
Highly sought after on the concert and recital circuit, Joyce has been in residence at Carnegie Hall and the Barbican Centre in London, has toured extensively throughout the United States, South America, Europe, and Asia, and has performed as a guest soloist at the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms. Other notable concerts include those with the Berlin Philharmonic with Sir Simon Rattle, the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Philadelphia Orchestra with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and the Orchestra of the Accademia Santa Cecilia and the National Youth Orchestra USA with Sir Antonio Pappano.
Joyce’s extensive discography, recorded exclusively for Warner Classics/Erato, includes the celebrated Les Troyens (winner of the coveted Gramophone Award for Recording of the Year) and Handel’s Agrippina (Gramophone’s Opera Recording of the Year). Other albums by Joyce include her unique EDEN, which has toured nearly 40 cities around the world, the acclaimed Winterreise with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Songplay, a Grammy winner, In War & Peace, Gramophone Award for Best Recital of 2017, Stella di Napoli, Diva Divo, and Drama Queens, all Grammy winners. She has also been awarded Gramophone’s Artist and Recital of the Year awards, and has been inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame for the first time.