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Joyce DiDonato: Eden

Joyce DiDonato in a blue floaty top with her arms above her head, with red face paint on her temple and the sides of her face

Joyce DiDonato’s latest project is nothing if not ambitious. James Drury finds out more.

‘It is an overture to contemplate the sheer perfection of the world around us, and to explore whether or not we are connecting as profoundly as we can to the pure essence of our being,’ writes the globally esteemed mezzo-soprano.

The idea came to her five years ago and was initially a ‘preachy’ and ‘militant’ call to arms about climate change, but evolved into something more universal that goes beyond that to ask us to embrace our role as part of nature. ‘There’s this disconnect within people at large, within communities, within nations, that we’re not taking care of each other,’ she told the Irish Times. ‘And that’s the bigger question that EDEN morphed into in these last two years,’ 

As well as a concert tour and album, EDEN also includes outreach work with schools. The project’s catchline ‘One song, one seed’ aims to plant seeds of change in people’s minds as we revel in the mezzo-soprano’s broad choices of music. To that end – and somewhat more literally – you’ll have received a corn poppy seed, which DiDonato would like you to plant. ‘They were once a familiar sight in arable fields but modern farming methods have made them much less common,’ she says, explaining why these were chosen for Barbican audiences. 

She hopes as a result of this project people will ‘look how much extraordinary benevolence there is in the world around us; let’s participate in building that up and taking care of that’. 

The driving force behind this mission is DiDonato’s relentless optimism (she laughs she sometimes belligerently clings to this trait). Renowned as an activist, she says ‘I know music can save lives, heal deep wounds, unify communities, and can bring real hope and comfort in the darkest hour. This is why I am an activist.’ She’s taken part in prison outreach work in the USA, is an active advocate for music education through El Sistema, which has changed the lives of more than 700,000 children in Venezuela, and uses her platform to champion social change.

EDEN opens with Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question. On a trip to Brazil for the development of the project, conductor Maxim Emelyanychev suggested the 20th century American experimentalist composer’s piece. ‘I went, “We can’t do Charles Ives, what are you talking about?”,’ recalls the Kansas-born singer. ‘He started to play this music. I’d never heard it before and the minute it started, I was transported into the cosmos. I didn’t dare breathe for the four and a half minutes it was playing…we all got goosebumps and said “that’s how we start”.’

This breath-taking work begins with a solo voice posing what sounds like a question that goes unanswered until the wind section strikes up with an almost robotic response. The original voice seems to persist, asking again and again, and the answers come with a little more impatience, a growing sense disagreement among themselves as they become discordant. 

DiDonato says: ‘What I love about it is it’s putting us in a place that’s slightly outside of ourselves; it’s giving that energy we all have: why am I here, what’s happening to me, what are we doing to ourselves? We all have so many questions in our head right now and this piece is somehow calming but so human.’ 

Following this extraordinary opening is the UK premiere of The First Morning of the World written by Academy Award-winning English composer Rachel Portman with libretto by Gene Scheer, who frequently works with DiDonato’s long-time collaborator Jake Heggie.

Knowing that his new piece comes after The Unanswered Question, Sheer’s first line is ‘There is a language without question marks; you can read it in the rings of trees and in the wind and in the river and in the sound of birds singing. Has their song changed from the first morning of the world?’ It then takes us on a journey of more questions, asking for the grace to be able to speak that language. 

‘It was very important for us in this project to create a new piece and to have the birth of something, because the whole thing is about planting seeds, putting seeds of music, ideas, questions, maybe even answers along the way and seeing what fruit comes from them,’ says DiDonato. ‘Rachel is such a beautifully sensitive, attuned human being and composer. That searching and sensitivity comes through her music.’

‘This project and this piece is a call to remember that this language exists, that we’re a part of it, and the gifts and the revelations that come to us if we can open back up and value, listen and engage with it. This isn’t just about avoiding climate disaster, it’s about giving ourselves the fullness of the life that’s here now, and connecting to that.’

Journeying through two centuries of works by the likes of Mahler, Gluck, Wagner and others, the concert closes with one of DiDonato’s showcase pieces, Handel’s 'Ombra mai fù’ from Serse. Inspired by the idea of sitting in the shade of a plane tree, it is one of the composer’s most famous and popular vocal works. It’s the perfect ending for a project that’s ‘trying to tell the story of perfection, the story of paradise, the story of being inundated and flooded with beauty, love, nature in its extraordinary balance,’ says DiDonato. ‘I would venture a guess that we’ve all had access to that feeling at one time or another. I find that when I listen to a story, when I’m carried away by music, it connects me to that glimpse a little bit longer. That’s what we want to build.’

© James Drury

Programme and performers

Programme

Charles Ives The Unanswered Question
Rachel Portman The First Morning of the World (UK premiere*)
Gustav Mahler ‘Ich atmet einen linden Duft’ from Rückert-Lieder
Biagio Marini ‘Con le stelle in ciel che mai’ from Scherzi e canzonette
Josef Myslivecek ‘Toglierò le sponde al mare’ from Adamo ed Eva
Aaron Copland ‘Nature, the Gentlest Mother’ from Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson
Giovanni Valentini Sonata enharmonica
Francesco Cavalli ‘Piante ombrose’ from La Calisto
Christoph Willibald Gluck 'Danza degli spettri e delle furie: Allegro non troppo’ from Orfeo ed Euridice
Christoph Willibald Gluck ‘Misera, dove son… Ah! non son io che parlo’ from Ezio
George Frideric Handel ‘As with rosy steps the morn’ from Theodora
Gustav Mahler 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’ from Rückert-Lieder

*Commissioned by University Musical Society of the University of Michigan; the Harriman-Jewell Series, Kansas City; Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation; and Cal Performances at University of California, Berkeley

Performers

il Pomo d'Oro
Maxim Emelyanychev
conductor
Joyce DiDonato executive producer and mezzo-soprano
Manuel Palazzo actor
Bishop Ramsey CE School Choir
Music Centre London Choir
Marie Lambert-Le Bihan
stage director
John Torres lighting designer

Translations

The First Morning of the World (Gene Scheer)

There’s a language without question marks.
You can read it in the rings of trees.
And in the wind and the river.
And in the sound of birds singing.
Has their song changed since they sang it once in Eden?
Oh, to understand the language of the trees...
the grammar of the earth...
the sounds and the songs from the first morning of the world.
But I am filled with nothing but questions.
And each one is bound together like logs on a raft,
Taking me down the river mile by mile.
Ever further away from the mountain top.
Ever further away from the borders of my heart.
Ever further away... away... away...
Away from the first morning of the world.
There is a torn map in my clenched first.
On it is marked where I have been
And where I want to go.
But this moment is not on any map.
It is in the rings of trees.
In the wind and the river.
It is in the sound of birds singing as they did in Eden.
In the songs on the first morning of the world.
Oh tree, Oh, bird, Oh, world. Oh, all of you...
Oh, forgotten garden! I am here.
Touch me. Teach me to sing notes that bloom like a canopy of leaves,
Meant to do nothing but feel the sun.

© Gene Scheer
Reprinted with kind permission of Hal Leonard Europe Ltd

Toglierò le sponde al mare (Giovanni Granelli)

Toglierò le sponde al mare,
Perderò cittadi e genti!
Acque pria, poi fiamme ardenti:
Alti danni e piaghe amare
Sulla terra spargerò!

Ah, mia spada, e di qual sangue
Finalmente andrai vermiglia?
Vela, o luna, al sol le ciglia!
Trema, o terra: estinto, esangue
Mira il dio che ti creò!

I shall remove the sea from its shores


I shall remove the sea from its shores,
I shall erase cities and peoples!
Waters first, then burning flames:
Sore destruction, bitter plagues
I shall scatter across the globe!

Ah, my sword, whose blood
Will turn you red at last?
Veil, O moon, your countenance from the sun!
Quake, O earth: lifeless and bloodless,
Behold the god who created you!

Misera, dove son? . . . Ah! non son io che parlo (Pietro Metastasio)

Recitative
Misera, dove son? L’aure del Tebro
Son queste ch’io respiro?
Per le strade m’aggiro
Di Tebe e d’Argo? O dalle greche sponde,
Di tragedie feconde,
Le domestiche furie
Vennero a questi lidi,
Della prole di Cadmo e degli Atridi?
Là, d’un monarca ingiusto
L’ingrata crudeltà m’empie d’orrore,
D’un padre traditore
Qua la colpa m’agghiaccia:
E lo sposo innocente ho sempre in faccia.
Oh immagini funeste!
Oh memorie! Oh martiro!
Ed io parlo, infelice, ed io respiro?

Aria
Ahi! Non son io che parlo,
È il barbaro dolore
Che mi divide il core,
Che delirar mi fa.

Non cura il ciel tiranno
L’affanno, in cui mi vedo:
Un fulmine gli chiedo,
E un fulmine non ha.

Alas, where am I?  . . . Ah, it is not I who speak 


Recitative
Alas, where am I? Is this the air
Of Tiber that I breathe?
Do I wander through the streets
Of Thebes and Argos? 
Or have domestic furies,
Sprung from the race of Cadmus and the Atridae,
Come to these shores of ours from Greece,
That has spawned so many tragedies.
The cruelty of a wicked monarch
Fills my soul with horror,
The treacherous deed of a father
Causes my blood to run cold;
And I always see before me
My innocent betrothed. Ah, baleful images!
Ah memories, ah torment!
And yet I, unhappy woman, can live and breathe?

Aria
Alas! It is not I who speaks, 
But the wrenching grief
That breaks my heart asunder
And renders me insane.

Heaven is insensible
To my despair:
I beg it for a thunderbolt
And it has none to send.

Translations by Richard Stokes © author of The Book of Lieder (Faber, 2005) and The Complete Songs of Hugo Wolf (Faber, 2021)

Artist biographies

Multi Grammy Award winner and 2018 Olivier Award winner, Joyce DiDonato entrances audiences across the globe and has been proclaimed ‘perhaps the most potent female singer of her generation’ by The New Yorker. With a voice ‘nothing less than 24-carat gold’ (The Times), Joyce has soared to the top of the industry both as a performer and a fierce advocate for the arts. 

Joyce’s recent roles include Agrippina at the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House, Didon Les Troyens at the Vienna State Opera; Sesto, Cendrillon and Adalgisa Norma at the Metropolitan Opera, Agrippina in concert with il Pomo d’Oro; Sister Helen in Dead Man Walking at the Teatro Real Madrid and London’s Barbican Centre; Semiramide at the Bavarian State Opera and Royal Opera House, and Charlotte Werther at the Royal Opera.

Much in demand on the concert and recital circuit, Joyce has held residencies at Carnegie Hall and at London’s Barbican Centre, toured extensively in the United States, South America, Europe and Asia and appeared as guest soloist at the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms. Other highlights include the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique under Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and the Accademia Santa Cecilia Orchestra and the National Youth Orchestra USA under Sir Antonio Pappano.

An exclusive recording artist with Warner Classics/Erato, Joyce’s expansive discography includes Les Troyens, which in 2018 won the Recording (Complete Opera) category at the International Opera Awards, the Opera Award at the BBC Music Magazine Awards and Gramophone’s Recording of the Year; and Handel’s Agrippina which won the Gramophone Opera Recording and Limelight Opera Recording of the Year awards in 2020. Joyce’s other albums include her celebrated Winterreise with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, In War & Peace which won the 2017 Best Recital Gramophone Award, and her Grammy-Award-winning Diva Divo and Drama Queens. Other honours include the Gramophone Artist of the Year and Recital of the Year awards, and an induction into the Gramophone Hall of Fame.