It’s just after five o’clock at Bishop Ramsey secondary school in north-west London when the sports hall fills with smoke and a fire alarm shrieks into action. An opera singer, a children’s choir, a film crew, some teachers and, seemingly from nowhere, a portly vicar in black vestments pour into the cold, dark afternoon to regroup in the playground. Joyce DiDonato’s Eden project is not quite going according to plan.
DiDonato, probably the most esteemed mezzo-soprano active in opera today and recently seen singing in Handel’s Theodora at the Royal Opera House, has devised an Eden of many parts — an album of green-themed arias, a global tour and an education programme, funding choirs and workshops in 18 cities on the tour. This programme explains why she has trekked to Ruislip, on the outskirts of the city, to film a video with a choir from one of the participating schools; when the smoke clears, they will be singing a song whose lyrics are based on what the kids think trees would say about climate change (“I’m on my own as nature drowns”).
DiDonato, 53, has already taken them on a tramp through the school’s chilly woodland to talk about the environment, with urgent messages: “Quit asking the corporations to do it . . . It comes from you guys!” she jollily exhorted a crowd of bemused faces.
Two weeks later, sitting inside the Barbican Centre in London, DiDonato — a specialist in Handel, Mozart and Rossini but whose range includes contemporary works such as Jake Heggie’s death-row opera, Dead Man Walking — says she conceived of Eden five years ago. It started off, she says, “preachy” and “militant”, a climate call to arms. It gradually evolved into something she felt suited her better: “I’m much more powerful when I’m speaking about the light and hope,” she says, and her voice sounds like the sun gently rising.
The problem for her is humans’ disconnection from nature, and she identifies music as, “the closest thing that man has been able to [devise] that replicates the natural world, a balance of harmony, of plasticity, fluidity, constantly changing, constantly rearranging”.
The Eden album explores — occasionally tenuously — that relationship, starting with Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question”, where DiDonato’s unearthly vocalisation climbs over Il Pomo d’Oro’s unquiet woodwind. Her clarity and control, even at the softest moments, transfix us in one of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder. In “Toglierò le sponde al mare” by 18th-century Czech composer Josef Mysliveček, she really seems to enjoy playing an angel threatening to visit “sore destruction, bitter plagues” upon the Earth.
One of the reasons DiDonato has incorporated an educational element into Eden is her frustration at how schools and governments have allowed music to vanish from the curriculum. Performing is “confidence-building, it’s esteem-building, it’s team-building and it’s empowering to those kids that, especially after the last two years, haven’t had the chance to go out into the world and go, ‘Here I am!’”
Outreach and authenticity come up repeatedly. She talks of performing Handel to prisoners at Sing Sing in New York, their gut reactions, raucous calls and standing ovations: “Those men got that aria . . . better than a lot of modern-day audiences in traditional venues.” These values are a challenge to today’s classical music establishment, she says: opera does not “lean in hard enough to what we are . . . This music has an emotional impact on people and I think sometimes we’re like” — haughty voice — “‘Oh no no, I want to be able to discuss this against the 1973 Böhm recording.’ No, I want people to feel it and I want them to feel alive and I want it to” — she voices a boom — “explode into their chests.”
DiDonato’s speaking voice, with its range of colours and expressions, has the same conviction and control that distinguish her on stage: she has an actorly quality of fully inhabiting her lines. It’s this quality she tries to coax from young singers in a masterclass at the Royal Academy of Music: as she urges them — each word that you sing, why is your character singing it?
This approach chimes with DiDonato’s impulse to coax classical music down from its ivory tower (which is not to say that she does not defend its exacting standards). “The music industry is one of service, it’s not one of stardom,” she says. “You chose to get into this, you chose to do the work, you’re not owed anything from this industry, you’re there to serve.”
She is also exploring new formats for concerts, whether that’s a singer speaking to the audience during a recital, a casual classical gig in a bar or her own multi-platform projects, which have included In War and Peace, developed in response to the November 2015 Paris terror attacks. Behind all this is the licence to experiment and to make mistakes “and to fail spectacularly, because if we’re only trying to be safe, then great art is not created that way”.
Asked which artists have thrilled her lately, DiDonato gives an answer sure to rustle the programmes at Wigmore Hall: Bimini, the chic queen from season two of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, at home in fashion’s wildest reaches. In her own field, she names bass-baritone Davóne Tines, soprano Julia Bullock (her co-star in Theodora) and flautist Claire Chase.
What she does not want to see are commissions, jobs and roles being handed out “by checking boxes” of gender, race or other characteristics. She speaks keenly for equal opportunities but regrets hasty moves: “It’s tricky because people are just given [opportunities] based on one qualifying factor [even if] the quality is not there. I don’t think anybody is served by that.”
Her talk of service rather than stardom applies not just to the music industry but to music itself. She talks of her voice as “this thing that I know comes through me but at other times it doesn’t always feel like it belongs to me. Janet Baker talks about this beautifully: you do all the work then you remove yourself from the equation and when that happens, it’s — the word that comes to mind is a kind of divinity comes into it, which is a complicated word but that’s kind of what it feels like.”
Sometimes it feels like that for the listeners too. The Eden album ends with one of DiDonato’s showpieces, “Ombra mai fu” from Handel’s Serse, a gentle ode to the shade of a plant. Back in the sports hall in Ruislip two weeks ago, accompanying herself on a rickety piano, DiDonato sang “Ombra mai fu” to a cluster of kids gathered around. Her voice was natural and true and, yes, somehow, divine.
‘Eden’ is released on February 25 by Erato and the tour begins in Brussels on March 2, joycedidonato.com
Opera singer Joyce DiDonato: ‘My voice doesn’t always feel like it belongs to me’
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