What Opera Singer Joyce DiDonato Can’t Live Without (original) (raw)

What Opera Singer Joyce DiDonato Can’t Live Without

Photo-Illustration: The Strategist; Photo: Chris Gonz, Joe McKendry

If you’re like us, you’ve probably wondered what everyday stuff famous people add to their carts — like hair spray or an electric toothbrush. We asked opera singer Joyce DiDonato — who stars in the new opera Innocence, opening tonight at the Met — about the Japanese incense, salt water nasal spray, and Spanish olive oil she can’t live without.

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In staging six hours a day, and especially because I do a lot of very physical work as an actor on the stage, you’re just wiped out at the end of these days. This smells so good: It has clove and eucalyptus and because it’s salt based, it really does help you relax. It gives you a great night’s sleep and feels good. I’ve been using this for ten years.

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I found this on the Wolf & Badger site and it just kind of stuck out at me and I thought, Huh. I ordered it and I fell in love with it. It’s almost the only thing I wear. I have it in different colors. It’s all natural materials. There’s I think 40 women that work in Bulgaria to make this, and they do it with a lot of care. I get compliments on it in an airport line everywhere I go. You can dress it up or dress it down. I loved it so much that the last recording I did of the poems of Emily Dickinson, which we just started touring, I wrote the owner Vessellina and asked her to make the dress of Emily in a similar fashion. It’s marrying a little bit of the famous white linen dress of Emily Dickinson with the Metamorphoza in Bulgaria. It’s so practical, it washes well, it wears well. You can throw it on and you look put together. I fly in it quite a lot. I rehearse in it. I’m literally wearing it now. You feel flirty and feminine but casual. It’s a perfect dress in my opinion.

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It’s not very exotic, but it’s a staple for a singer. I do it every morning, every night, and especially if I’m on a plane or anything. It helps anything that might be stuck to keep moving, keeps things cleaned out. The minute I feel like it’s not working very well I know I have to actually do it a bit more.

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This is a little bit tricky. It’s not exactly an everyday thing. I have a house in Spain and I get bulbs every fall and every spring. I plant them and I rarely get to see them come to fruition because I travel so much. But I love putting them in the ground. I love the standard tulips and daffodils, but what I have fallen in love with in Spain are dahlias. They are indestructible if they get enough sun and they are so colorful and they grow and they grow and they grow. They’re so prolific and they last a long time. It’s something about being in the ground, being part of the planting, and then just letting these ugly brown dead things turn into something extraordinary. There’s one that’s white with tinged lilac ends and it’s huge, it’s a dinnerplate one, and it’s so delicate but beautiful. And the white just pops in the garden. Then you cut them and bring them in and the purple just pulls in any colors you have in the kitchen or wherever you put it.

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These are so good. You need a special holder for them because they’re super skinny and they burn all the way down. It’s a way to help unwind. For example, these rehearsals of Innocence are deeply difficult. The music is very difficult as well as the subject matter, and you’re living in this world of trauma all day. I have to have things that help me clear that and shift the mood. These are so calming. They’re not overly processed; they’re not full of a lot of filler stuff. They’re really potent and wonderful. It’s lit every day at some point. I can put it over the kitchen sink and it goes into the whole apartment. Or I put it in the bedroom or wherever I’m going to be positioned for a couple hours.

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Of course I love olive oil and Spain has just incredible ones, but I really like the spicy kind that is almost too much but not quite. You don’t wanna cook with it, but you finish with it and drizzle it on a salad, over a little bit of cheese, anything really. Bread. Oh my God. Dipping bread in it. Dangerous but delicious. I love the story of the guy and I love the title and it’s delicious. It can’t really be bettered. I mean, Italy has some good ones, too.

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I am very much an amateur but avid photographer. I did a safari in Africa a number of years ago, and I’ve done several since, and I just fell in love with photography through my travels. My first safari was in South Africa, and then I went back to Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda. My last one was Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. It was life changing. What I love about photography is that in my opera life the standard is perfection. We have to be perfect, which of course we never are and we drive ourselves crazy trying to achieve that, but that’s the standard, that’s the expectation. I love having something in my life that is still artistic but that I don’t have to be technically great at. I can do it for my enjoyment and share it. And at the same time it completely turns off my audio world, so I don’t have to listen, I don’t have to speak or sing. It’s just visual. I find that I can go really deep into that and I love it. It helps me observe the world better.

I take a lot of photos and then I edit a lot and I love to make souvenir books. I always give them as gifts to my stepsons. Every year I compile photos from how I’ve seen their year and so they now have seven years’ worth of memories. I really take a lot of time with it. Shutterfly is super-easy and superfast. Sometimes I’ll make photo books for casts. I’ll put together images from rehearsals and things for an opening-night gift. Shutterfly is great because if I’m giving it to a cast of 50 you have to think about pricing and all that, and the turnaround time is really great. Artifact Uprising is more for the important, end-of-the-year gift for my stepsons, for example. It’s more like a proper book that really lasts, like a Rizzoli or a coffee-table book. Those take a little extra time.

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This ties into the dress as well. The album and tour I did of the Emily Dickinson poems is a full song cycle of 24 poems. It’s the most extraordinary project I’ve ever been a part of. We were just at Carnegie Hall a couple weeks ago and I had the concert of my life. She’s always been a part of my world but having delved into this whole cycle, I’ve gone even further in it. It’s a wonderful book. There’s almost 2,000 poems, so you can pick a poem a night and it will take you a long time to get through it. It’s unbelievable how modern they are, how timely they are, how they challenge you. She challenges me a lot in looking at things through a very different angle. And I sometimes have to sit with them for a while and then it’ll click in one way and it just blows my mind. This is a book to have for a lifetime. Each time you come back to a different poem, it will hit you differently.

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