Thrilling recital that proves soprano is a legend in the making
Classical Lise Davidsen
Barbican Hall, London EC2 ★★★★★ By Rupert Christiansen
To console those who lament a modern world woefully short of organ-like voices that can steadily fill large halls with a flood of beautiful sound, there is at least the great white hope of Lise Davidsen. This 33-year-old Norwegian soprano has provoked comparisons with her compatriot Kirsten Flagstad, whose majestic singing of Wagner’s operas in the Thirties and Forties remains the stuff of legend.
Davidsen has already blown Glyndebourne audiences away in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, and she will sing the title role in Beethoven’s Fidelio at Covent Garden next month: but for this recital, she addressed the more delicate challenge of the song repertory. What was exciting is how powerfully it proved that Davidsen is not simply a natural phenomenon. True, she does not yet have the ability to colour or illuminate a word or phrase with indelible meaning
– as she sailed through Brahms’s fervent Von ewiger Liebe I was reminded of the common complaint about Flagstad to the effect that, however overwhelmingly perfect her vocalising was technically, she didn’t really seem to know what she was singing about.
But there is deep sensitivity in Davidsen’s musicality. Her impeccable breath control allowed her to spin an exquisitely pure legato, magically sustained through Strauss’s Wiegenlied and Befreit; and in Sibelius’s eerie Luonnotar, she generated a rich sense of dramatic atmosphere. Her intonation is immaculate at either end of the dynamic scale; the top register shines like silver in sunlight; it all sounds confoundedly effortless. There are no empty displays of these goods: by the art that conceals art, simple things like Grieg’s enchanting Zur Rosenzeit or Schumann’s setting of Mary Stuart’s final prayer were left properly pure and simple.
Full marks to Davidsen for her tasteful couture, her unaffected comportment, and her committal to memory of all the texts she undertook. I wasn’t quite so sold on the kitschy lighting effects or the rather banal and uninformative commentary she delivered between items via a microphone.
Her pianist was James Baillieu: unfailingly sympathetic, perhaps to a fault in Brahms and Strauss, but poetically imaginative in Sibelius’s Luonnotar and a match for Davidsen’s rapt pianissimo in Strauss’s Morgen, an encore that held an otherwise ecstatic audience in pindrop silence.
No further performances
Davidsen’s intonation is immaculate and the top register shines like silver in sunlight