2021/22 Season Preview: EDEN with Joyce DiDonato and Il Pomo d’Oro
UMS will present our schedule for 2021/22 in-person performances on May 13! Each week until then, we will preview a new program.
This Earth Day, UMS proudly announces a visionary co-commission on themes of nature and the environment starring Joyce DiDonato.
Following her recital performance of Schubert’s Winterreise with pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin and as part of her UMS Digital Artist Residency during the 2020/21 season, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato turns her creative vision and artistry to her next great passion: EDEN.
Watch Joyce’s message about the new project (60 seconds):
Exploring the majesty, might, and mystery of Nature through both arresting and evocative music and theatrical effects, Joyce takes us on an emotional journey to reconnect to the power and fragility of Nature, exploring our place within the kaleidoscopic, wondrous world around us.
Joined by the original instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro and Maxim Emelyanychev, as well as the French stage director Marie Lambert, Joyce will perform a wide-ranging program cycling from Handel to Ives, Gluck to Mahler, inviting the audience to consider their own place in the world…and perhaps to even change it.
Date and time for EDEN will become available when the full 2021/22 season is announced in May.
About the Artists
Joyce DiDonato
A multiple Grammy-winner, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato is a transformative presence in the arts whose healing approach to music has taken her beyond the world’s great opera stages to educational institutions, refugee camps, and maximum-security prisons. She has appeared on UMS concerts three times in the past several years, including in the lead role in Handel’s Ariodante, with pianist Yannick Nézet-Séguin in Schubert’s Winterreise, and again with Nézet-Séguin and his Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal in November 2019. She is an exclusive recording artist with Erato-Warner Classics.
Il Pomo d’Oro
The ensemble il Pomo d’Oro was founded in 2012. It is characterized by an authentic, dynamic interpretation of operas and instrumental works from the Baroque and Classical period. The musicians are all well-known specialists and are among the best in the field of historical performance practice. The ensemble so far worked with the conductors Riccardo Minasi, Maxim Emelyanychev, Stefano Montanari, George Petrou, Enrico Onofri Francesco Corti and Antonello Manacorda. Concertmaster Zefira Valova leads the orchestra in various projects. Since 2016 Maxim Emelyanychev has been its chief conductor, and since 2019 Francesco Corti is principal guest conductor.
Marie Lambert
French director Marie Lambert as born in France and grew up in Paris and England. She studied literature in Paris and Bologna and directing at La Scala, Milan. Lambert has worked for dozens of opera houses throughout her career, including the Royal Opera House, Glyndebourne Festival, and Welsh National Opera in the UK, La Scala and the Maggio Musicale in Italy, as well as the major companies in Barcelona, Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Chicago, San Francisco, Brussels, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, and many other music capitals around the world.
Joyce DiDonato’s recent collaborative albums with Il Pomo d’Oro include In War & Peace — Harmony through Music (2016) and Handel: Agrippina (2020).
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