Joyce DiDonato records Jake Heggie’s ‘Dead Man Walking’ for Virgin Classics
Joyce DiDonato has reprised her acclaimed performance in 2010 for Houston Grand Opera of the nun Sister Helen Prejean in Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking for Virgin Classics.
DiDonato first sang the role in
2002 for a New York City Opera production of a work based on the memoirs of Prejean – a leading advocate for abolition of the death penalty in the USA – and an Oscar-winning film adaptation, depicting her experience as a counsellor to a prisoner on death row in Louisiana.
The new Virgin recording – the second of the work following the 2000 live Erato recording of its San Francisco premiere, with Susan Graham as Prejean – also features baritone Philip Cutlip as the convicted Joseph De Rocher, soprano Measha Brueggergosman as Sister Rose, and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade playing Mrs De Rocher in her last opera appearance on stage. Patrick Summers conducts.
Dead Man Walking will be released in April.
