Joyce DiDonato doesn’t just sing Winterreise. She acts it too. This is not as rare as you may imagine. The desolated lover’s winter journey is an accommodating masterwork. Actor-singers including Håkan Hagegård, Mark Padmore and Simon Keenlyside have performed staged versions too, establishing for all except diehard purists that a traditional male voice and piano recital need not necessarily be the only way with Schubert’s bleak setting of Wilhelm Müller poems.
DiDonato takes this a step further by inhabiting the songs from the standpoint of the woman whom the poet has deserted. Many women, including Alice Coote, have performed these songs with searing authenticity, but DiDonato’s theatrical skills bring something more. Costumed in black mourning, she sings each song from the poet’s journal, giving her voice to the verses within. Only at the end, in Schubert’s totemic final song, Der Leiermann (The Organ Grinder), does she put the journal aside and own the song outright, and with it the whole cycle’s pain, as her own.
