A visceral gusto that’s impossible to resist

Tutt and nitpick and raise your eyebrows all you like, there’s no denying that Karita Mattila socks it to an audience through a star quality all too rare on the classical scene today.

Striding out to face the audience with a dazzling smile as though she’s the queen of some marvellous party, this prodigious Finnish soprano, a glamorous, curvaceous, Amazonian blonde, radiates intense pleasure in singing, visceral love of the music, and a generous desire to share her joy in herself. How can one resist such gusto?

Well, you could say she is a creature of the stage rather than the concert platform or recital salon, and that hers is not a temperament or talent cut out to negotiate the finer points of lieder.

Here at the Wigmore Hall, you could sense the diehard connoisseurs shaking their heads with sceptical disdain at her head-on approach, and they have a point: the text was often occluded, some floated pianissimi went awry, and occasionally she came adrift from her splendidly assertive pianist Ville Matvejeff, who was more than a match for her flamboyance. Hers is not copybook good singing of a dainty or meticulous kind.

But the voice is in excellent nick. At the age of 56, after a 35-year career, when most sopranos are fading into decline, she continues to fire robustly on all cylinders. Warmed up, she can still sing softly to generate a warm tonal glow and at the climaxes above the stave she raises the rafters without a hint of vibrato or tremolo.

Even more impressive than this is her commitment: whether it’s exuberant gypsy songs by Brahms or the slyly seductive cabaret number by Friedrich Holländer presented as a playful encore, she inhabits what she sings, making it vivid, real, personal.

At the heart of her programme, sandwiching Berg’s gloomily ruminative songs op.2, were Wagner’s

Wesendonck Lieder and a group by Richard Strauss. The Wagner lacked something of grandeur and gravitas, at least until she reached an impassioned

Träume, spun out along a rich legato. Best of all was the Strauss, from the enchanting coruscations of Der Stern to a rapturous Wiegenlied and a magnificent account of Wie sollten wir geheim sie halten. She’s not so much a great artist as a force of nature: resist it at your peril.