Joyce DiDonato
(Picture: Mark Allan)The troubling events of the last couple of years have caused many to recalibrate their attitude towards nature. As our lives seem to get more both precarious and more hectic, we have become increasingly aware of the immutable forces of nature ever present as backdrop to our existence. Few, though, have the talent or imagination of Joyce DiDonato to give such potent expression to the fragile relationship of humanity to the natural world as she does in her programme Eden, presented at the Barbican Hall last night.
DiDonato’s Eden project, recorded by Erato, is being toured to five continents, with associated educational activities. Its intent is characteristically evangelical, hoping to alert us all to the possibility of enhancing our social interactions by a greater awareness of nature’s “astonishing mystery and perfect balance”.
The programme ranges widely from Cavalli and his less well-known contemporary Biagio Marini through Gluck to Wagner and Mahler. The sequence opens with Charles Ives’s oracular The Unanswered Question, the trumpet solo here replaced by DiDonato’s voice emanating atmospherically from various parts of the auditorium as she moved invisibly from balcony to stage. The theme of cosmic questing was picked up in Rachel Portman’s soft-edged yet sensitive setting of Gene Scheer’s poem The First Morning of the World, receiving its UK premiere.
Stage director Marie Lambert-Le Bihan’s ingenious set, consisting primarily of two hoops, one broken, moving through different planes, was lit by John Torres with an éclat that sometimes threatened to belie the natural world. DiDonato initially brandished a length of steel doubling as scimitar and Cupid bow, using it later symbolically to complete the second circle. Nature was thus made whole in readiness for As with Rosy Steps the Morn Advancing from Handel’s Theodora, in which DiDonato appeared at Covent Garden a couple of months ago. Here the superb Baroque ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro, under the dynamic Maxim Emelyanychev, both delivered the Handelian style infinitely more stylishly than the Royal Opera orchestra and paradoxically abetted DiDonato in her gripping if sometimes alarmingly introspective reading.
Elsewhere the group provided bracing accompaniments in arias by Myslivecek, Gluck and others, modifying their sonorities for the Romantic offerings by Mahler (two songs from the Rückert Lieder) and Wagner (Schmerzen from the Wesendonck Lieder).
As the project moves from city to city, the team works with local schoolchildren, encouraging them to create their own ecologically aware contributions. DiDonato ended by welcoming to the stage pupils of Bishop Ramsey School in Ruislip who performed their own song Seeds of Hope. She then regaled them and us with the celebrated eulogy to a plane tree sung by Handel’s Xerxes.
It’s a riveting show, superbly executed, by turns movingly hymning the wonders of nature, saccharine-infused and blazing with conviction. For ninety minutes DiDonato and her colleagues heartwarmingly plant seeds of hope in a blighted world as only art can.
