8/12/2023 0 Comments Another eden chance encounterBecause the children are only onstage for the encore, they’re also able to see most of the program before being ushered backstage. Staged by Marie Lambert-Le Bihan and with lighting design by John Torres, the production is sleek yet well-considered. “Seeds of Hope” at the Carnegie Hall performance of EDEN, with Joyce DiDonato and Salute to Music and the All-City High School Chorus (Though, as one student who was singing the song with their choir wrote in a YouTube comment earlier this year, “It is nice but dark af.”) After a program of arias spanning Francesco Cavalli to Rachel Portman, threaded together by themes like climate change, violence, injustice, and isolation, the idea is to end with hope. At the end of a tireless 90-minute solo performance accompanied by the orchestra Il Pomo d’Oro, DiDonato welcomes the kids onstage for the first of two encores, “Seeds of Hope.” The anthem was written specifically for the project by the middle school choir students of West London’s Bishop Ramsey School. The youth choir doesn’t appear until the end of EDEN, DiDonato’s semi-staged, concert program that began its multi-phase tour last year (along with an accompanying album on Erato). “We’ll sit like this, because I want to sing something just for you,” she says during a rehearsal for that evening’s concert, speaking to the children of the El Sistema Greece Youth Choir in the honeyed voice of a midwestern kindergarten teacher. It’s hard to look at Joyce DiDonato as she sits on the stage of Athens’s Megaron Concert Hall, surrounded by 77 children, and not think of Maria von Trapp.
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