Joyce DiDonato, 39, is an American mezzo-soprano particularly admired for her interpretations of Handel, Mozart and Rossini. She has performed with many of the world’s leading opera companies.

Her new album, Furore: Handel Opera Arias, is out now on Virgin Classics, and she will perform this repertoire at the Barbican, EC2, on Saturday. She lives in Kansas City with her second husband, the conductor Leonardo Vordoni

My last two vacations have been holidays of a lifetime. One was to South Africa, for the honeymoon we’d been too busy to take when we married. We flew to Cape Town, went wine tasting in the vineyards and took the most amazing trip to Boulders Beach. It’s a beautiful bay on the southernmost tip of

Africa, but what makes it really special is that it’s home to colonies of African penguins. They were amazing to watch, strolling along the sand, taking a dip in the sea and emerging to be raucously greeted by their friends. Very human. The most moving thing we saw was a couple standing on the cliffs kissing each other’s necks.

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We ended up in the Sabi Sabi Game Reserve and spent several days staying in a lodge. While I was there, I found a balance that I don’t think I’ve ever really felt before. There’s such a natural rhythm to life in the wild, linked to sunrise and sunset, and the animals have a natural relationship with their surroundings, where nothing is random and each has its own place in the food chain. As a musician, I kept thinking that the rhythm of life was completely harmonious, and a total contrast to the imbalance of human lives.

My husband is more of a beach man, so last summer, we took the holiday he has always wanted, to Santorini in Greece. We stayed in a beautiful villa with a plunge pool that looked out across the Aegean; we swam, hiked, ate well and watched the light changing on the cliffs as the sun sank into the sea. It was perfect.

I’ve recently become interested in photography, which makes me see places in an entirely new light. Most of my life is aurally centred, and taking pictures forces me to stop listening and really look at places. Even places that I know very well now appear new and endlessly fascinating.

This spring, I was in Paris, a city I am fairly familiar with. On the lookout for potential photographs, though, I began to notice little things like intricate doorframes, couples sharing a bottle of wine in the park, a homeless man whose dog had had puppies. These things are what makes a city, but it’s easy to get lost in the great sights and not notice them.

Paris is one of my favourite cities and every time I go I try to stay in a different area. On a recent trip, I rented an apartment just off the Rue St Denis that seemed unbelievably cheap. It was only when I was struggling to open the door and a man approached me that I realised I was in the middle of the red-light district! I had a few close encounters, but I was glad to have seen a very different side to the city.

I am number six of seven children and our holidays were always to Denver, Colorado, where we’d stay in a cabin owned by Jesuit priests. The Catholic church had a lot of land there and we had an uncle who was a priest, so we were allowed to stay free of charge — a necessity if you are going to take seven children away for the summer. We used to drive in an old Ford station wagon, with three rows of three seats and a big luggage rack on top. We were each given a 2ft by 2ft box to pack our things, and there was another for laundry detergent. Seven children fishing and hiking and messing about by a lake meant there was no laundry holiday for my mother.

It was a long drive from Kansas and, despite always feeling hot and sick, those early holidays gave me a taste for the open road. I still love driving across the States. One of my favourite journeys is from Kansas City to Santa Fe. The route takes in part of Route 66 and you can stop and see crocodile farms and the world’s largest ball of string, but what makes it remarkable is the vastness of the landscape. You drive for hours at a stretch and see nothing but an ocean of land, broken only by the odd tiny town, with a grain silo and a church. You get this incredible sense of space and can really feel where the American Dream came from. Anything seems possible when your horizons are literally endless.

Joyce DiDonato talked to Lizzie Enfield

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