Brava! A mass cheer rose at the fashionable Café Fiorello, the Italian restaurant across Broadway from Lincoln Center where what’s left of New York’s smart set goes for chic after-theater dinners. In one of those increasingly rare New York City moments combining spontaneity with celebrity, the honored arrival was the young Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, who at age 36 had just enjoyed the rare distinction of performing in a solo recital at the Metropolitan Opera House. In increasingly dire straits, The Met has been casting about for new stars as audiences and revenues have declined and once-popular performers have become taboo for asinine political reasons. Longtime Met General Manager Peter Gelb, who entered Fiorello’s, as it is commonly known, with Davidsen and was greeted with disappointed murmuring by those who recognized him, seems to have identified her as his best hope in the soprano category.
Davidsen’s rise has been meteoric. She came onto the international scene just before the pandemic, appearing in 2019 to rave reviews (including my own) as Elisabeth in an intriguing new production of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Bayreuth Festival. Later that year, in a season that was truncated everywhere by the COVID-19 pandemic, she made her Met debut as Liza in a rare but worthy revival of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. Since performances resumed in 2021, she has returned to the house in the High German Romantic repertoire, taking on Eva in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the title role in Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, Chrysothemis in Strauss’ Elektra, and, last season, the iconic Marschallin in the same composer’s Der Rosenkavalier, a role of challenging psychological complexity typically reserved for more experienced sopranos.
Later this season, which officially opens in late September, she will appear as Leonora in a new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, a role originally envisioned for the superstar Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, whom the Met controversially ousted in March 2022 (Netrebko won an arbitration judgment against The Met in February 2023 and is now suing the company and Gelb). The Met will revive its attractive, storybook production of Tannhäuser this fall, but sadly Davidsen is not cast in it. She will, however, perform the Wesendonck Lieder, Wagner’s celebrated song cycle, in concert with the Met Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in February 2024.
Will Davidsen match up to the divas who preceded her on the Met stage? Standing over six feet tall and humble in bearing, she is unlikely to make many enemies. The voice is big and loud, especially in the upper register, bearing some comparison to her countrywoman of yesteryear Kirsten Flagstad, though more modern audiences debate her merits against those of Swedish sopranos Birgit Nilsson and, in contemporary times, Nina Stemme. The consensus is that she lacks Nilsson’s power and Stemme’s subtlety, but there is time for that. Originally trained as a mezzo, she has a tendency to push out from her chest voice to gain loft in soaring ascents, an effect that can sometimes sound undisciplined in pitch.
Davidsen was accompanied with artful deference by the South African pianist James Baillieu, who will work with her in a series of recitals around the world this season. She chose an eclectic repertoire. Most of it was a success, though not necessarily in the expected repertoire. Her Wagner was limited to Elisabeth’s signature aria from Tannhäuser, “Dich, teure Halle,” an ebullient greeting of the Singers’ Hall of Eisenach’s storied Wartburg Castle, where she will soon be reunited with the opera’s title character, a wayward minstrel knight who must resist the wiles of Venus to seek her hand. The selection demands high spirits and a rather lighter touch than most Wagner soprano parts, and in both categories Davidsen succeeded with aplomb. She reached deeper in opening the second half with Liza’s arioso of waiting from The Queen of Spades, a monologue of nervous apprehension as the character awaits the arrival of the desperate Ghermann, whom she loves but whose love she rightly doubts. The tones were as cold and bracing as the frozen river into which Liza jumps when he abandons her for the gambling tables that soon bring about his own ruin.
The only Strauss—in fact the only Strauss the Met will have this entire season—came in the second half, in a selection of five of his better known songs. Strauss composed over 200 such pieces, but only about 15 are performed with any regularity. Davidsen chose from among those standards, especially succeeding in the haunting “Allerseelen,” a reflection of lost love on All Souls’ Day. Her expressive power emerged most gloriously, however, in “Befreit,” which tells of a young man releasing his beloved to the embrace of death. “Zueignung,” “Cäcilie,” and “Morgen”—the last two are part of a song cycle Strauss gifted his soprano wife Pauline de Ahna for their wedding—were all model recital pieces but carried less originality than technical dexterity.
A kind of mannered facility also dominated the first half of the recital’s cycles of six songs by Edvard Grieg and four by Jean Sibelius—all intensely romantic tales of love and affection arising from the realm of dreams and enchantment. Indeed, three of the songs have the word “dream” in the title, in one Germanic language or another. They are less well known recital pieces, and Davidsen’s execution of them was beautiful and refined, though her best singing among them came in her impassioned delivery of Grieg’s German poem settings “Zur Rosenzeit” and “Ein Traum.”
If Davidsen restricted her usual repertoire, she left room for discovery. She confessed an aversion to Schubert, whose songs are recital fare so common as to be routine, but their delicacy drew her into masterful interpretations with a crystalline nuance that sheer vocal power might otherwise have overwhelmed. “An die Musik” and “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” were deeply affecting, but the spooky, haunting “Erlkönig” found her in best voice. She also showed some hidden talent for lighter repertoire, following the Strauss songs with “Heia, heia” from Emmerich Kálmán’s Die Csárdásfürstin and, albeit too heavily in tone to predict a great future as Eliza Doolittle, Frederick Loewe’s “I could have danced all night,” from My Fair Lady.
The recital left the overall impression of a solid and earnest singer with strong ambitions that may well be fulfilled in the march of time. The only slight disappointment came in its two plaintive Verdi selections, perhaps an ironic portent since her only staged appearance with the Met this season will be in Forza. Alas, “Morrò, ma prima in grazia,” from Un Ballo in Maschera, and the Ave Maria from Otello flattened out with an over reliance on vibrato and lacked emotional depth. Both characters anticipate immediate death at the hands of jealous husbands, the first pleading with him to allow her to see their child one last time, and the second reciting the traditional Christian prayer of penitence to reconcile herself to a fate she does not fully understand. The emotional range is hard to master, and the parts may lie in Davidsen’s future. The same cannot be said, however, for her agile first encore “Vissi d’arte,” from Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, in which the title character laments her own impossible situation with a meditation on her devotion to art, love, and good works that would in a just world exempt her from horror. The audience, however, witnessed a natural star continue to ascend.
