Opera superstar Joyce DiDonato has announced her new project “EDEN,” a multi-faceted initiative that will see the famed mezzo dedicate much of her time over the next four years to uniting music, drama, and education to confront questions of our individual connection to Nature.

The initiative will be comprised of a tour of over 45 venues across five continents between 2022-24, an Erato album, ground-breaking education program, and multiple partnerships.

“With each passing day,” said DiDonato in an official statement, “I trust more and more in the perfect balance, astonishing mystery and guiding force of the natural world around us, how much Mother Nature has to teach us. EDEN is an invitation to return to our roots and to explore whether or not we are connecting as profoundly as we can to the pure essence of our being, to create a new EDEN from within and plant seeds of hope for the future.”

The mezzo-soprano will collaborate with Il Pomo d’Oro and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev and with stage director Marie Lambert and Academy Award-winning composer Rachel Portman, combining music from different genres with a stage setting designed to connect the audience with the very heart of the natural world around us.

The Erato album EDEN is set to be released on Feb. 25, 2022 and the international tour will begin on March 2, 2022 in Brussels. The repertoire for both is richly diverse, pulling from the timeless theme of nature which has captivated composers over the centuries with each track exploring an aspect of humankind’s relationship with nature and will, in DiDonato’s words, “have no boundaries – like a wild garden.” Among the composers that will be featured are Handel, Gluck, Wagner, Mahler, Ives, Copland, and Oscar-winner Rachel Portman.

The tour will have stops at Luxembourg, Arnhem, Amsterdam, Aalborg, Hamburg, Athens, Vienna, Budapest, Moscow, St Petersburg, London, Dublin, Kansas City, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Toronto, New York, and Washington.