Joyce DiDonato stars in `Eden in Olympia' coinciding with Paris Games, a call to climate action

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Will we return to Eden?” In a series of scenes set to music from Baroque to Mahler’s “Rückert-Lieder” through “The First Morning of the World” by Academy Award-winner Rachel Portman, director Olivier Simonnet visualizes DiDonato’s audio recording released two years ago, a call to action on climate change. “I find it comforting to know that this isn’t the first time we’ve been facing difficult things as a species on the planet, but we do have the power to set things right,” DiDonato said this week. “I think that presence, that energetic presence in the show, is very strong.” DiDonato started to conceive “Eden” in 2019, and the recording with conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d’Oro was released in 2022. “We filmed that all in two days and we were on such a tight schedule, and we couldn’t afford to ever even go over 10 minutes on any scene, and we didn’t.” Simonnet's 59-minute movie was released in Europe on ARTE last weekend, on Greece’s ERT2 on Thursday and on Carnegie Hall+ on Friday.