‘We are nature’: singer Joyce DiDonato invites her audience to imagine their Garden of Eden, and gives seeds to sow it
- Opera singer Joyce DiDonato’s Eden show, in Hong Kong soon, has songs inspired by nature by composers as varied as Gluck, Mahler and Oscar winner Rachel Portman
- The Grammy Award winner believes people in urban jungles have lost their connection with nature, and so she hands seeds to audience members to regrow that link
For multiple Grammy Award-winning opera star Joyce DiDonato, the impacts her performances have outside the concert hall have become as important as the pleasure the audience feels inside.
The 55-year-old American mezzo-soprano has had an extraordinary career, singing at all the world’s top opera houses, and has released highly rated, genre-defying albums such as 2019’s Songplay that blends opera with jazz.
Since 2015, following the terrorist attacks in Paris, her shows have increasingly included social and political messages about such topics as prison reform, conflict and the global refugee crisis.
Her latest show, Eden, which comes to Hong Kong on June 3, is an attempt to bring the audience closer to nature at a time when humans’ relationship with the planet has reached crisis point.
Speaking to the Post ahead of the performance, in which she will be accompanied by regular collaborators the ensemble il Pomo d’Oro, DiDonato says the aim of the show is to project nature as a perfectly balanced mystery, one to which humans are integral.