Sometimes Words Just Get in the Way

courtesy of Unison Media

One week from today Erato will release its latest album of performances by mezzo Joyce DiDonato. The title of the album is EDEN (caps part of the title); and it is the latest product of an artist seriously concerned with how to cope in the midst of a pandemic. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Those that have followed this site over the last two years know that I have encountered any number of performances, physical as well as virtual, by artists determined to cope with pandemic conditions by drawing upon their creative talents. The Amazon Web page includes the following quote from DiDonato:

EDEN is an invitation to return to our roots. It is an overture to engage with the sheer perfection of the world around us, to consider if we are connecting as profoundly as we can to the pure essence of our being. It is a clarion call to contemplate if our collective suffering isn't perhaps linked to the aching separation from something primal within and around us. This is a vivid musical exploration through the centuries to remember and to create a new EDEN from within.

I am afraid that I do not respond well to such verbiage. At my most irritable, I tend to refer to it as “granola logic” (which is probably unfair to granola, which at least has nutritional value). More fundamentally, however, I have come to belief that, in such uncertain times, the music that has the greatest impact tends not to be burdened down by words. Thus, while there is no denying that EDEN is a product of good intentions, we know the usual cautionary advice about such intentions.

Fortunately, most of the tracks provide vocal works from different past periods of music history, with Giovanni Valentini (seventeenth century) at one end and Aaron Copland (twentieth century) at the other. However, the second track is a world premiere recording of “The First Morning of the World,” composed by Rachel Portman working with a text by Gene Scheer. When compared with all of the other tracks on the album, this is the one offering that feels as if it is going on forever; and I am not about to conjecture how much of the blame is due to words and how much to music. By the time I had hit the halfway mark in the text, I could think only of that series of albums released by Frank Zappa under the general title Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar!

The sad thing is that the album gets off to a splendid start. DiDonato’s accompanying ensemble, Il Pomo d’Oro, plays Charles Ives “The Unanswered Question.” However, the “inquisitive” trumpet part is taken over by DiDonato. Fortunately, she vocalizes with the same deadpan delivery that one encounters in the original score, in which the persistent neutrality of the trumpet “question” is met with annoyed frustration among an ensemble of flutes. In planning out the overall program of this new CD, DiDonato seems to have overlooked Ives’ point that the only “answer” to the trumpet’s question is a still silence.