Recording of the Week, Joyce DiDonato's EDEN

Five years on from her multi-media project In War and Peace, Joyce DiDonato is back with another concept-album today, and this time her subject is the fractured relationship between humanity and nature. As the American mezzo states quite candidly in her booklet-note, she doesn’t profess to have all the answers – unlike her erstwhile colleague Malena Ernman, who’s effectively abandoned an international opera career in order to support the work and principles of her daughter Greta Thunberg, her focus remains squarely on art rather than activism. But the eclectic programme which she’s so imaginatively curated here nonetheless does a potent job of encouraging listeners to renew their personal connection with what American poet Gene Scheer memorably describes as ‘the grammar of the earth’ in his text for the new commission on the disc.

In keeping with that perspective, the album opens with Ives’s The Unanswered Question, and what a revelation it is to hear the work performed by Il Pomo d’Oro, whose usual territory is baroque repertoire rather than twentieth-century Americana: the gut strings lend a magical veiled quality to the ‘Silence of the Druids’, whilst the anxious woodwind interjections register with even more urgency than usual on period instruments and DiDonato’s bleached vocalise (on what's usually the trumpet line) complements these extraordinary colours to eerie perfection.

The aforementioned commission, Rachel Portman’s The First Morning of the World, seems to emerge organically from the closing bars of the Ives, its rippling flute ostinato conjuring a real sense of the great outdoors and harking back to the musical landscapes of Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Scheer’s poetry in itself is a thing of wonder, full of the simple but powerful eloquence which characterises much of his work with Jake Heggie - and both Portman’s unfussy (though never banal) setting and DiDonato’s sincere delivery of it should ensure a long-term place in the repertoire for this radiant, moving work.

The Portman piece, in turn, segues quite beautifully into a ravishing account of ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’ from Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, where again the combination of DiDonato’s relatively light, bright mezzo and the period-instrument ensemble pays dividends in a performance that offers a real breath of fresh air to those of us who know and love any of the fuller-fat recordings of the cycle which dominate the catalogue.

Though the Portman and Mahler offer beguiling depictions of nature as the ‘generous mother’ which Emily Dickinson describes in a poem set by Copland (which receives an equally luminous performance a little later on), DiDonato certainly doesn’t shy away from the idea that all is not well in paradise as the recital progresses: an aria from Mysliveček’s Adamo ed Eva finds her full of sound and fury as the Old Testament God calling plague and punishment down on His disobedient subjects, and Il Pomo d’Oro spit fire and brimstone in the Dance of the Furies from Gluck’s Orfeo rather than giving us a comforting glimpse of the Elysian Fields and Blessed Spirits from the same opera. And in a haunting account of ‘Piante Ombrose’ from Cavalli’s La Calisto, DiDonato’s parched tone and the dry, spare sonorities of the strings paint a stark picture of nature in crisis which lingered in my memory for days.

Perhaps the biggest surprise on the album is 'Schmerzen' from Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder, which reveals a thrilling blade in DiDonato’s upper register and had me wondering if she might ever be tempted to essay one or two of the composer’s operatic roles if the conditions were right for her. (Spoiler alert: she told me in our interview yesterday that Brangäne definitely doesn’t beckon, though if this track whets your appetite as it did mine you’ll be glad to hear that a complete set of the Wesendoncks is in the offing as a ‘side-project’ to EDEN…).

There’s another wonderful ‘teaser’ on the menu, too, in the form of Irene’s glorious ‘As with rosy steps the morn’ from Handel’s Theodora, which DiDonato sang with such mesmerising conviction at Covent Garden just a few weeks ago and recently recorded for Erato with Il Pomo d’Oro and a cast that includes Lisette Oropesa and Michael Spyres. And the same composer’s evergreen ‘Ombra mai fu’ from Serse brings this thought-provoking, moving album to the most exquisite close.