Opera superstar Joyce DiDonato says music has the power to heal

American opera singer Joyce DiDonato grew up in a house full of music, she says.

“There was a lot of noise. There was a lot of music.” She told RNZ’s Concert of her childhood home in Kansas.

One of seven siblings, her father worked from home and preferred classical music, her brothers were in the basement were blasting heavy metal and she was upstairs with her sister playing 80s pop.

“It was super eclectic and super alive. And I think it's one reason I have such a huge musical appetite.”

The Grammy award-winning mezzo-soprano is performing Hugo Berlioz Les Nuits d'été with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra nest week as well as Also masterclasses in Wellington (27 Nov) and Auckland (Sun 30 Nov).

It's the first time DiDonato has performed in New Zealand.

The idea of vocation and service was also instilled in those early years, she says.

“The topic around the dinner table wasn't necessarily, here's how to start your IRA. Here's how to get to the top law firms. That focus was not at all coming from my parents.

“It was much more; how will you use your life to be of service? What will your vocation be? How will you serve?”

This led her to an initial career as a music teacher but the performing bug took hold early on, she says.

“I said, 'Dad, I'm really torn because I love the stage so much, but it feels really selfish. It feels really a bit narcissistic, actually, because it's all about me and I have to work so hard and I love it. And here in the classroom, there's such a need.

“And he just really looked at me. And I think it's the key to my life. And he just said, 'Joyce, there's more than one way to teach people'.”

That advice became her “North Star,” she says.

A stellar international career has followed, but DiDonato also takes her music to unlikely places. Through the Musicambia programme in conjunction with Carnegie Hall, she works with prisoners at Sing Sing maximum security prison in New York.

One man, Joseph, inspired by the programme, wrote his own opera.

“We came back about 10 months later and he was the first guy in the room. And he came to me and he said, 'Joyce before you came here, I didn't know opera existed'.

"'And in these last 10 months, I've been listening to everything I can get my hands on. And I realised I need to write my own opera'.”

She and Joseph performed a duet from that opera in front of 200 inmates, she says.

“Here he was in front of his peers that he was going to see in the yard the next day or in the canteen the next morning.

“And he dropped to his knees with his hand on his heart and his other hand reaching to the blood moon, in his words, as he wrote, begging for forgiveness.”

DiDonato has been leading masterclass workshops for years. Having been “obliterated” by teachers early in her career, she takes a different approach, she says.

“It's more I'm getting them to free themselves, and getting them to remember why they love music, encouraging them to remember that they have talent, and to stop scrutinising so closely that they hold in this tension, to release it, release, let it go.

“That's usually what my work is. I think what may be my greatest strength as a teacher is to get them more intensely committed to conveying what the music and the text is about, that's probably my gospel.”