On March 22 at the Konzerthaus Dortmund Joyce DiDonato will sing the world premiere of Another Eve by Oscar winning composer Rachel Portman and award winning librettist Gene Scheer. This expanded work is the second collaboration for this talented trio since they first collaborated on The First Morning of the World in 2020. Maxim Emelyanychev conducts.
Here’s what Rachel Portman and Gener Scheer have written about their new piece:
As Joyce concluded her Eden world tour, she invited us to create a song cycle that would further explore the themes we had begun to uncover in our previous collaboration, The First Morning of the World. That piece, rooted in the desire to connect with the essence of creation and find harmony within nature’s rhythms, became the foundation for Another Eve.
Each song in the cycle reflects a different impulse to embrace perspectives that emerge from the idea of Eden. The First Morning of the World was like a stone cast into a pond—its ripples expanding in many directions, yet all leading back to a shared hope: a deep, resonant connection to the world around and within us.
The borders of Eden, of course, are not drawn on any map. Yet, guided by Joyce’s luminous voice and her extraordinary ability to communicate, we set out to create songs that might make us feel as if she had been there—returning not just with music, but with an experience she could share, allowing us to glimpse, if just for a moment, that world through her.
