It is a dilemma that the last heartfelt sounds of Mahler’s “I’m lost to the world” plunge you into, with which Joyce DiDonato ends her moving evening in the music theater: you want to applaud the mezzo-soprano and at the same time wish for this silence in the hall may not end.
The American also opens her evening “Eden” quietly with the spherical “The Unanswered Question” by Charles Ives, in which she asks herself and her audience “whether our collective suffering and chaos is not related to the painful separation of something fundamental in us and in our environment,” as she writes in the foreword to her program.
Her personal response is an invitation to remember nature, our roots, and to find solace in music. “Nature and music show us the way”, which leads through the past three centuries of music history. And the singer has been to 45 locations on five continents since March, of which Linz was the 20th stop.
Right in the heart
All the works of “Eden” are entwined with nature, for example when the delicate scent of lime trees covers the hall in Mahler’s Rückert song or the beauty of a dawning day in an aria from Handel’s oratorio “Theodora”. The lamentation of Cavalli’s “La Calisto” for scorched earth (“Piante ombrose”), on the other hand, tells of devastation and destruction.
Especially in the withdrawn moments, Joyce DiDonato’s supple, velvety mezzo-soprano hits right in the heart. In “Eden” she shares many such inspired moments with the audience, exuding a deep inner peace. The 53-year-old is accompanied by the wonderful original sound ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro, which, under its director Maxim Emelyanychev, masters the stylistic diversity from baroque to romanticism and beyond, evokes moments of pause, but also releases energetically explosive forces, as if in one furious dance from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice”.
Sparing performative elements underscore the message of the evening: up to the penultimate aria, Joyce DiDonato has put fragments of a circle back together to form a whole, symbolizing the cycle of life, but also the connectedness of everything and everyone. “There is no easy solution. It’s about relationships and our connection to each other and to the world,” she also addressed her audience in words, whom she thanked for the thunderous applause with two encores – one of Wagner’s Wesendonck songs and the Largo from Handel’s “Xerxes”. “What are we leaving for the next generation?” Her message couldn’t be more urgent than at the end together with the clear voices of the children’s choir of the Landestheater.
“We all have a chance to make a difference” so that this world might be a little more Eden.
Conclusion: A touchingly haunting, but also urgent evening.
Source: Nachrichten
