On Friday night Otto and I went to Joyce DiDonato performing at the Barbican.   I didn’t know what to expect and was unprepared for the force of her voice and the magnificence of her stage presence singing Ravel’s Shéhérazade and then, by special request of the conductor, Alan Gilbert, an encore of Strauss’s Morgen.   It was impossible to match in the second half of the more conventional NYPO orchestra.