Brentano String Quartet & Joyce DiDonato, Mezzo-soprano

Fast on the heels of the enormous success of Joyce DiDonato’s first recital appearance on our series this season, and following the end of the Brentano String Quartet’s residency at Princeton, we are pleased to offer a way to hear both of these great artists again…together! This Dream Team will join forces for the Princeton premiere of Camille Claudel: Into the Fire, a song cycle for Mezzo-soprano and String Quartet written by composer Jake Heggie with lyrics by Gene Scheer Heggie. The work focuses on the tragic demise of the genius sculptor and lover of Rodin, Camille Claudel. Claudel’s career ended when she was confined to a mental hospital for the last three decades of her life. Her involuntary incarceration, which many considered unnecessary, almost doomed her to obscurity. The piece, which received its world premiere in San Francisco, was called “a heartbreaker,” by The San Francisco Chronicle, and was described as “a score of deep, squishy sentimentality and enormous beauty.” When asked what attracted him to Camille Claudel, composer Jake Heggie said, “I am consistently drawn to stories about transformative quests for identity. Claudel’s story is of a woman struggling to be known on her own, and on her own terms, for the genius that she was given. It touches on elements of feminism, on the art world, on judgments of the public versus the internal life of the artist, and on mental illness. In the end, Camille [Claudel] does triumph, because her sculptures love and dance and sing.”