Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato describes EDEN as "an invitation to return to our roots...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." Most of the song texts refer to nature, giving the album a vaguely environmentalist tinge. As a basis for musical exploration, it all seems so general that it would be of little use. Yet this is DiDonato's genius. She has a real gift for bringing together musical materials in the most unexpected ways, and she does so with special intensity here. The program gets underway with Ives' The Unanswered Question (DiDonato indicates that the pandemic has filled her above all with questions), and its solo part is sung, not played by a trumpet. How does DiDonato get from there to Biagio Marini and Josef Mysliveček (she gleefully moves from very familiar pieces to ones that are all but unknown)? Listen and learn. There is new music and music from the early 17th century, the Baroque, the Classical period, Wagner, Mahler, and it all seems a single gesture. Part of her method is to set the motor rhythms of the music of earlier eras against the greater flexibility of the later pieces. DiDonato poses great challenges with all this to the small chamber orchestra Il Pomo d'Oro under conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, and they step up to those challenges admirably. The sound from the Teatro Comunale di Lonigo opera house in Italy is ideal. It may be that, after all, DiDonato achieves her lofty goals here; at the very least, this is a vocal-orchestral recital with greater variety than anything else one is likely to hear these days in the genre, and it is good to see that her adventurousness has been rewarded with commercial success.
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