In an article for OPERA America, John J. Lennon covers American opera singer Joyce DiDonato’s visit to Sing Sing Correctional Facility and her collaboration with fellow prisoner — and composer — Joseph Wilson.
EXCERPT
On the first Saturday afternoon in October, 4,000 well-to-do folks, paying as much as $400 a seat, packed the Metropolitan Opera House to see Bellini’s Norma. Few of them could have known that Joyce DiDonato, the production’s Adalgisa, had spent most of the previous day up the river, rehearsing and performing alongside prisoners in a concert at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Nor would they have known that DiDonato’s guest of honor at the Met matinee, seated in the general director’s box, was Renée Wilson, the wife of Joseph Wilson, a Sing Sing inmate.
Joe is a 38-year-old man with a linebacker’s build who’s serving 25 years to life for killing a man on a Brooklyn street in 2005. When DiDonato first visited Sing Sing in 2015, under the auspices of Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections program, her performance sparked a newfound passion for Joe: composing classical music. He wrote an aria, “Starlights,” that she performed during her 2016 visit. Now he’s writing an opera: Tabula Rasa, a story of murder and retribution set in a futuristic dystopia. In this year’s concert, he joined DiDonato on stage to perform “Katham confronts Eohis,” a scene from that work.