Antonio Pappano conducts Heggie and Berlioz — With Joyce DiDonato

The darker side of obsessive love provides delicious dramatic tension in not one, but two works as mezzo-soprano extraordinaire Joyce DiDonato teams up with Sir Antonio Pappano and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra! Joyce returns to a song cycle written for her in 2012 by Jake Heggie, Camille Claudel: Into the Fire — a heartrending homage to the legendary sculptor who was a lover and muse of Auguste Rodin, and whose family ultimately committed her to an asylum for the final thirty years of her life. This "wonderful calling card for DiDonato," performed here for the first time in the Netherlands, is also "a music in perfect harmony with the way in which Claudel's sculptures move, or rather dance" (Gramophone). Sir Antonio and the RCO round out the program with Berlioz's deliriously programmatic Symphonie fantastique, a diabolical depiction of all-consuming infatuation that leads to opium-laced dreams of a witches' sabbath…

Photo © Simon Jay Price