Davidsen, Lise

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    Review: Lise Davidsen Meets Puccini in ‘Tosca’ at the Met

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    The powerhouse soprano, already a company stalwart at 37, still seems to be figuring out a character whose moods change on a dime.Aficionados have sometimes criticized the Metropolitan Opera for waiting too long to engage singers with starry careers in Europe, like a sports team that acquires only veterans. Even the loudest complainers, though, would have to praise the Met’s early, deep investment in the powerhouse soprano Lise Davidsen, a generational talent from Norway.Davidsen, 37, made her house debut five years ago in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.” The title role in Puccini’s “Tosca,” which she sang on Tuesday in a gala honoring the centenary of the composer’s death, is already her seventh part with the company.With a huge, marble-cool voice that she can pull back to a veiled shadow or unleash in a floodlight cry, Davidsen has been most memorable in works by Wagner and Strauss that have broad vocal lines for her to sail through.She has embodied the mythic longing of Ariadne in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and brought opulent purity to Eva in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” Last season, venturing into Verdi with “La Forza del Destino,” she captured Leonora’s eternal woundedness.For saintly, long-suffering figures like Wagner’s Sieglinde and Elisabeth, she’s perfect. Davidsen is tall and statuesque — noble, yet modest. She’s not slow-moving onstage, but there’s something glacial about her. She seems most comfortable when she can settle into a character’s steady state for a few hours and just sing.Tosca is a different beast, and Davidsen still seems to be figuring her out. Puccini’s operas are nothing but endless, changeable business: pocketing letters, discovering keys, spying a knife. Every tiny response is illustrated in the music, and moods shift on a dime. His works require hair-trigger agility, even febrility.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Lise Davidsen Achieves Strauss’s Ideal in ‘Salome’

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      Strauss had seemingly impossible standards for a soprano in “Salome.” But Davidsen, making her role debut in Paris, is exactly what he intended.Richard Strauss’s criteria for the ideal interpreter of his opera “Salome” have haunted the piece for the better part of a century: a “16-year-old princess with the voice of Isolde.”As oxymorons go, it’s the operatic equivalent to Noam Chomsky’s famous syntactic puzzle “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Clear, simple, impossible. And yet here is the 37-year-old Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, in the middle of her role debut as Salome in Paris, launching her voice like a rocket that opens into a parachute in the cavern of the Opéra Bastille.With a teenager’s sly mockery of her parents and a blooming sexual awakening, Davidsen’s young Judean princess, seen on Wednesday, gradually matured in color and volume. But when she reached the determined outburst of “Gib mir den Kopf des Jochanaan!” (“Give me the head of John the Baptist!”), her top voice detonated with a force that sent shock waves of youthful, shimmery sound reverberating equally in all directions. She stepped into her 16-year-old Isolde, and held the audience rapt for 20 more minutes of epiphanic sumptuousness.I had never made the connection between Salome’s final scene and Isolde’s climactic Liebestod in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” Usually, they don’t sound alike. Opera fans sometimes reach for Strauss’s one-liner to describe a soprano with some mix of the role’s beauty, lyricism, youth and power, but there is an implicit compromise, a sense that “this is as close as it gets.” As Davidsen unleashed huge arcs of exalting tone, though, her voice was soft and heavy like thickly piled velvet; she reveled in Salome’s obsessive love to music of apotheosizing grandeur and purified her desire of its murderous origins.This revival of Lydia Steier’s disturbingly powerful production gave Davidsen a profound context to explore her interpretation. Steier’s militarized hellscape felt both primitive and postapocalyptic. Violent orgies, stripped of ritual, set the stage for gleeful sadism and recreational murder. King Herod (Gerhard Siegel, a seasoned Wagnerian with technical security and confident point) is styled as a depraved chieftain in black lace, soiled robes and a feathered headdress, and he presides over a ruling class that delights in bludgeoning and asphyxiating sex slaves. Their crimes are visible through a large glass window high above the stage. The Dance of the Seven Veils is a scene of rape. It would all be crass, if it weren’t for the craft of the staging’s detailed movement choreography.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Lise Davidsen Cements Her Stardom in Met Opera’s ‘Forza’

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      Lise Davidsen, entering the Italian repertoire at the company, was part of a superb cast as Verdi’s opera returned for the first time since 2006.As dramatic music swirled late Monday evening, the woman trudged a few steps pushing a filthy shopping cart — so hunched and bedraggled that she seemed like an extra, sent onstage to set the scene before the star entered.Then she opened her mouth, and a note emerged so pure and clear, widening into a cry before narrowing back into a murmur, that it could only be the soprano Lise Davidsen, cementing her stardom in a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” at the Metropolitan Opera.In her still-young Met career, Davidsen has triumphed in works by Tchaikovsky, Wagner and especially Strauss. She has quickly become the rare singer you want to hear in everything. But Verdi and the Italian repertoire traditionally belong to voices more velvety and warm than hers, which has the coolly powerful authority of an ivory sword, particularly in flooding high notes.There were moments on Monday that wanted a soprano more fiery than ivory. Davidsen is statuesque, and her sound is too: grand and decorous. There were moments when the anguish of Leonora, the heroine of “Forza,” would have been more crushing if her lower notes had earthier fervor.But come on. Quibbles aside, there are vanishingly few artists in the world singing with such generosity, sensitivity and visceral impact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lise Davidsen Stars in ‘Forza’ at the Met Opera

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      The singer, best known in the works of Wagner and Strauss, is starring in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.”Lise Davidsen, who grew up in Norway playing sports and considering a future in songwriting, didn’t see Italian opera onstage until she was working on her master’s degree as a budding soprano in Copenhagen.During her studies at the Royal Opera Academy a decade ago, she took in the classics: Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosca,” Verdi’s “Macbeth.” But she watched them without any thought that she would one day sing their famous roles.They were still not on her mind when, after skyrocketing to stardom with a lightning-bright sound and power perfectly suited for the works of Wagner and Strauss, she debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 2019, in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades.”On Monday, though, Davidsen, 37, will star in the Met’s new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino.” And next season, she will sing the title role in “Tosca.” Suddenly, she has entered the world of Italian opera, taking on vastly different roles by two of its greatest composers.“I had to work harder to convince the houses that I could even do Verdi and the Italian repertoire,” Davidsen said in an interview. “But vocally, I am quite ready.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Concerts Reveal a Dramatic Shift Between Mahler Symphonies

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      Over consecutive evenings, the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra performed Mahler’s works on programs with star sopranos.Gustav Mahler had a near-death experience between the composition of his Fourth and Fifth symphonies. They were separated by a gulf that listeners could plunge into this week in consecutive concerts by the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.The Fourth was the third in a trilogy of symphonies that featured vocal settings of poetry from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” a folk collection that inspired Mahler, and it ends with a vision of heaven articulated by a soprano with childlike purity. The Fifth — which followed a hemorrhage that left Mahler bleeding out and on the verge of death — is a huge, bifurcated work, magnificently twisted in the Funeral March that opens it and cosmically buoyant in the finale.At David Geffen Hall on Wednesday, Gianandrea Noseda led the Philharmonic in a performance of the Fourth that sidestepped its intriguing, hectoring mystery and embraced the more conventional aspects of its Romanticism. The cellos were broad and sinuous, and the violins sighed and shone in big, roomy gestures. The abrasive sound of a scordatura violin colors the second movement, but the concertmaster, Frank Huang, slyly played it straight, letting the instrument’s fiendish, squirrelly sound speak for itself.The work’s emotional catharsis comes in the second half, and here Noseda jarred his audience awake with the Mahlerian climaxes that have a way of shaking listeners out of a daze — a shock, but an affirming one. Golda Schultz’s sparkly soprano was beautifully suited to the vocal solo in the final movement. Her absolute optimism was seemingly untouched by earthly matters. Noseda didn’t exactly reconcile the solo and the jangly orchestral interludes that separate its verses, but the Fourth can be impenetrable in that way.Golda Schultz, left, as the soprano soloist with the New York Philharmonic and the conductor Gianandrea Noseda.Chris LeeDespite its elaborate structure of five movements in three sections and its prodigious length of 70 minutes, the Fifth is in some ways the more accessible piece, with its subjects of mortality and the good pain that comes with making oneself vulnerable to love. With the Fifth, Mahler moved away from programmatic or narrative conceptions of his work, but it’s incredibly tempting to map his autobiography to the piece: a macabre dream of his own death in the funeral march, and a love letter to his future wife, Alma, in the aching loveliness of the slow movement, the famous Adagietto.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lise Davidsen Is an Opera Star Worth Traveling For

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      Her high notes emerging like shafts of sunlight, Davidsen is playing the title role in Janacek’s “Jenufa” at the struggling Lyric Opera of Chicago.A new pop song is the same streamed anywhere. And if you wanted to see Beyoncé this year, she likely came to a town not far from you, giving pretty much the same show in Barcelona as she did in Detroit.But an opera star doing a role in Berlin or London doesn’t mean she’ll bring it to New York. When it comes to the art form’s greatest singers, there are things you simply can’t hear by staying put. And Lise Davidsen is worth traveling for.Davidsen, the statuesque 36-year-old soprano with a flooding voice of old-school amplitude, has been singing the title character in Janacek’s crushing “Jenufa” at Lyric Opera of Chicago this month. Though she has been a regular presence at the Metropolitan Opera — where she will star in a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” in winter — there’s no promise she’ll ever perform Jenufa there.So for those of us who hear in Davidsen’s rich, free tone the kind of golden-age instrument we otherwise know mostly through glimpses on old recordings, it was a privilege to be in Chicago.The added incentive was that the redoubtable soprano Nina Stemme would be onstage with her. At 60, Stemme is stepping away from the kind of dramatic touchstones, like Isolde and Brünnhilde, that Davidsen is gradually stepping into.Pavel Cernoch and Nina Stemme in “Jenufa,” directed by Claus Guth.Michael BrosilowDavidsen and Stemme in “Jenufa,” conducted by Jakub Hrusa, the young conductor recently appointed music director of the Royal Opera in London, in a grimly spare staging by Claus Guth: This was a coup for Lyric, especially since the Janacek has been running alongside a winning cast in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment,” as fizzily charming as “Jenufa” is desperately sad.Seen over the course of 24 hours this weekend, the pairing shows off the best of a venerable company that has been struggling in the pandemic’s aftermath, along with much of the American performing arts scene. Its chief executive, Anthony Freud, announced in September that he would step down this coming summer, two years before the end of his contract.Freud, 66, is retiring as the gap between opera’s costs and the demand for tickets grows ever wider. Financial pressures have prompted the company to pare back its performances; Lyric’s current season features just six mainstage productions, compared to eight in the last full season before the pandemic.But this was a weekend Freud could be proud of. The title character of “Jenufa,” set amid tangled romantic and familial relationships in a Moravian village in the 19th century, is secretly pregnant by a man who refuses to marry her. Her stepmother, a civic figurehead known as the Kostelnicka, desperate to keep the family from disgrace, kills the baby, a crime whose discovery leads to a stunned, sublime gesture of forgiveness.For this raw, agonized story, Janacek wrote tangy, lush yet sharply angled music, with unsettled rhythms and roiling depths; obsessively repeated motifs, as anxious as the characters; passages of folk-like sweetness; vocal lines modeled on spoken Czech for uncanny naturalness even in lyrical flight and emotional extremity; and radiant climaxes.Davidsen’s upper voice is her glory: steely in impact but never hard or forced, emanating like focused shafts of sunlight. (In Janacek’s fast, talky music, the middle of her voice didn’t project as clearly, but this is a quibble.)For a singer of such commanding capacity, she is remarkably beautiful in floating quiet. She played the character with prayerful dignity, reminiscent of Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello”; at the beginning of the third act, when Jenufa starts to think her suffering might finally be behind her, Davidsen registered on her face and in her freshening tone a cautious but real happiness. This is a singer who acts with her voice.I’ve always thought of Jenufa and the Kostelnicka as antagonists — a spirited youngster facing a repressive older generation — but this performance movingly suggested they are more alike than different: two independent-minded women, both isolated from the village mainstream. And Stemme’s voice remains strong and even; this is not your standard acid-tone Kostelnicka; in soft duet at the start of Act II, she and Davidsen made a combination that evoked “Norma”-like bel canto.Hrusa supported that sensitivity on the podium. His vision of the score emphasizes its sheer beauty, encouraging smooth lyricism and a kind of musical patience, letting the drama unfold rather than spurring it on. Sometimes this feels like mildness, at the expense of spiky intensity. But that this “Jenufa” is played something like a sustained hymn often heightens the aching tragedy.Guth’s production emphasizes the uniformity and repetition that define this small town’s small-mindedness. A prisonlike atmosphere prevails in Michael Levine’s airy yet forbidding set, Gesine Völlm’s constricting costumes and James Farncombe’s lighting, all leached of color.Metal bed frames that line the walls in the first act are arranged, in the second, to form an eerie enclosure, reminiscent of a refugee camp, in which Jenufa has been hidden to give birth. An ominous crowd of women in “Handmaid’s Tale”-style bonnets lurks on the sidelines; a dancer is dressed as a slow-stalking raven. The folk-wedding dresses that finally add brightness in Act III convey genuine joy after so much ashy heartbreak.Fizzy joy: Lisette Oropesa in Laurent Pelly’s production of “La Fille du Régiment” at Lyric Opera.Michael BrosilowThat kind of joy permeates “La Fille du Régiment,” one of the repertory’s most delightful comedies, presented in Chicago in the winkingly stylized Laurent Pelly production that has been at the Met since 2008. (The mountain range made of old maps is still superbly silly.)Lisette Oropesa and Lawrence Brownlee are both sprightly in Donizetti’s stratosphere-touching coloratura; this opera is famous for a tenor aria with nine high Cs, and after an ovation Brownlee repeated it with flair. But the pair are even better in the score’s slower-burning, longer-arching passages of tenderness.Lyric Opera of Chicago may be in serious trouble; its chief may be taking an early exit. But, having attracted Oropesa and, especially, Davidsen to the company for these memorable debuts, Freud is leaving on a high note. More

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      Lise Davidsen Shows Her Vocal and Theatrical Power in Recital Debut

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      Davidsen, a true dramatic soprano, was the rare singer whose first New York recital came at the Metropolitan Opera House.When Lise Davidsen sang the first four notes of Elisabeth’s aria “Dich, teure Halle,” from Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” at the Metropolitan Opera last night, all I could think to write down in my notebook was “holy” — and remembering to mind my manners — “cow.”That opening salvo was magnificent — an ideal balance of warmth, penetration and power that didn’t seem to strain her one bit.It’s rare for the Met to invite an artist for a solo concert in its 3,800-seat auditorium. And it’s rarer still for that singer to be making her New York City recital debut.But Davidsen is another rare thing: a true dramatic soprano. Originally trained as a mezzo, she possesses a fully resonant lower register that passes through a dark, capacious middle into a blazing, seraphic top. When her voice really starts flowing, its legato is molten, and the sonic boom of her high notes can cause a mild ringing in the ears. Davidsen’s timbre is also lovely in its shapeliness, metal wrapped in layers of velvet.Her rangy program with the pianist James Baillieu covered improbable distances — Verdi’s delicate Desdemona from “Otello,” Wagner’s ecstatic Elisabeth and Tchaikovsky’s shattered Lisa from “Queen of Spades”; Schubert’s gracious songs and Richard Strauss’s rhapsodic ones; silver-age operetta and golden-age musical theater.Rather than open the first half with Elisabeth’s rapturous greeting to the Hall of Song — too obvious — Davidsen chose three placid Edvard Grieg songs in her native Norwegian and three more in German. By the fifth song, “Zur Rosenzeit,” she was fully invested, adding a drop of ink to her pooling tone and bringing herself to the verge of tears amid the narrator’s grief-stricken desire. Baillieu also dodged expectations, exploring degrees of quiet from the Met’s vast stage.Sensitive and theatrically engaged, Davidsen doesn’t merely ply audiences with lots of high-decibel singing. In the long introduction to Lisa’s suicide scene, she swayed back and forth, almost unconsciously, as her character waits impatiently for a lover on a riverbank, unfurling a splendid sound shot through with a chilly gust. No sets, no costumes, no orchestra: But the whole opera was there.Using a microphone to talk to the audience between numbers, Davidsen, a witty, soft-spoken presence, explained the program’s personal bent. She wanted to bring her “home composer,” Grieg, to the Met stage; she had avoided Schubert for so long because she didn’t think dramatic voices were supposed to sing him; the “Queen of Spades” aria was a memento of her 2019 Met debut, and “Dich, teure Halle,” of her days as a voice student.She needn’t have worried about Schubert. Her tone in “An die musik” and “Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen” was voluminous, clean and gently applied, and she made a compellingly operatic scene out of “Gretchen am Spinnrade.”Perhaps there are times, though, when a voice is simply too big. The hushed, focused line of Strauss’s “Morgen” eluded her, and her tonal opacity, perfect for Wagner, sometimes obscured the vulnerability of an aria from Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera.” But the arching exclamations of Strauss’s “Zueignung” and Sibelius’s “Den första kyssen” sounded tailor-made for her.In a winking final set, Davidsen playfully enjoyed her own vocal glamour in an Emmerich Kalman operetta aria and slid languidly into Lerner and Loewe’s “I Could Have Danced All Night” in an apparent nod to the great Birgit Nilsson, who capped her famous recording of it with a missile-like high C.Davidsen may have been acknowledging that audiences are eager for her to pick up Nilsson’s mantle. But she had also spent an evening inviting them to get to know her own story and artistry first. More

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      Female Singers Shine in Royal Opera’s ‘Don Carlo’

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      In a Verdi revival at the Royal Opera, two top female singers are discovering, and rediscovering, characters from a real-life royal love triangle.Across the monumental, hourslong opera “Don Carlo,” two female characters take a journey unparalleled in Verdi’s canon of 28 operas. No witches here. No coughing courtesans. Just two real-life characters from history caught in a love triangle that rocked 16th-century Spain.And for the Royal Opera’s revival of Nicholas Hytner’s 2008 production (running for six performances from June 30 to July 15), two of the world’s top female singers are onboard: the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen making her role debut as Elisabeth of Valois. For her and Yulia Matochkina, a Russian mezzo-soprano, it’s a chance to delve into two of Verdi’s most complicated and fully realized female characters.“Don Carlo” is based on the play by Friedrich Schiller. It portrays a real-life Spanish prince, Don Carlo, and Elisabeth of Valois, a French princess, who are secretly in love, although she is betrothed to his father, King Philip II of Spain. Princess Eboli, also in love with Carlo, threatens to expose the affair. And Carlo’s dearest friend, Rodrigo, has maneuvers of his own. It all plays out against the grim backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition.The male characters often dominate the sprawling story, from the duet between Carlo and Rodrigo (one of the rare tenor-baritone duets in opera) to the Grand Inquisitor’s famous bass aria, which brings the opera’s menacing tone to a crescendo. But for many, it’s the women who move the story forward and offer perhaps the richest characterizations in Verdi’s repertoire.“One thing to remember with all of Verdi’s operas is what he learned from Victor Hugo, which is that conflict is at the heart to characterization,” Susan Rutherford, the author of the 2013 book “Verdi, Opera, Women,” said in a phone interview. “That idea really governs most of his output. I think in both ‘Aida’ and ‘Don Carlo,’ the women are very well rounded. It’s not melodramatic, like one is good and the other is evil.”Verdi’s interpretation of a Hugo piece —“Rigoletto” is based on Hugo’s 1832 play “Le roi s’amuse,” or “The King Amuses Himself” — and his works inspired by other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries may be part of the reason for such rich characterizations. It’s something that both Ms. Davidsen and Ms. Matochkina are aware of in their respective characters, which they discussed in interviews at the Royal Opera during the first week of rehearsals in early June.“Schiller’s drama deals with political and social conflicts and with numerous palace intrigues, but the opera is focused primarily on the characters,” said Ms. Matochkina, who has sung the role in several major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera. “Enchanting women use their beauty and charm to influence politics. It’s a rumor reflected in the opera that Princess Eboli had a love affair with the king and betrayed his trust, and she paid and suffered for it in every sense.”Yulia Matochkina as Princess Eboli. Ms. Matochkina has previously sung the role in several major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera.Bill Cooper/ROHThat sense of portraying a moment in history — no matter how fictionalized Schiller and Verdi and his librettist made it — is part of the excitement for both singers. Ms. Davidsen said she had empathy for Elisabeth’s predicament of being torn between the prince she loves and the king she must marry.“Forced marriage is not something most of us know up close, but we know that it exists, and we certainly know about royal families here in this country and also where I come from,” she said, referring to England and her native Norway. “We are not the royals, but we see it from outside: what it takes to be an official person, and how it is controlled by so many others.”That control — and the control of the Catholic Church during one of its darkest periods — is at the heart of “Don Carlo,” and the female characters react accordingly.“Both women cross boundaries of what are expected of nice girls, shall we say, but ultimately both of them find a more generous sense of their rivals,” Ms. Rutherford said. “Verdi’s female characters are in some ways stronger than their male counterparts.”“Don Carlo,” written by Verdi in 1867, preceded his astonishing output that included “Aida,” “Otello,” and his final opera, “Falstaff,” a life-affirming comedy at the end of a prolific career defined almost entirely by tragic operas.For Ms. Rutherford, the female characters in “Don Carlo” are not merely products of the machinations of men in past centuries.“I think it’s important not to look at them simply from our eyes,” she said. “We can look back at these operas and wring our hands, but their initial audiences saw these women as having different strengths and weaknesses.”Lise Davidsen, who plays Elisabeth of Valois, said she feels empathy for the 16th-century princess. “We are not the royals, but we see it from outside: what it takes to be an official person, and how it is controlled by so many others.”Bill Cooper/ROHMs. Davidsen is making her debut not only in the role of Elisabeth but also in a Verdi opera. She covered the role of Desdemona in “Otello” when she was studying at the Opera Academy at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen and was going to sing “Un Ballo in Maschera” in Oslo in 2021, but that production was canceled because of Covid. She has sung the famous “Don Carlo” aria “Tu che le vanità” in concert several times, but it was still a slightly intimidating prospect to jump into Elisabeth’s shoes. Part of the lure for the Royal Opera production, sung in Italian, was that it would be the five-act, four-plus-hour version (Verdi and his librettists wrote several versions, in French and Italian, and at least one skips part of the first act, where Elisabeth is hunting in the forest and has a bit of time to frolic before the palace intrigue kicks off).“I like that we’re doing five acts, so that we start at Fontainebleau in the forest,” she said. “It’s much lighter. You see the love and joy and all of the positive things instead of starting when she’s miserable. You need the happy Elisabeth. You see that she’s young and curious. She grows up so quickly.”Princess Eboli also can be seen as a reflection of Verdi’s commitment to his characters — particularly the female ones — and Ms. Matochkina sees the role as the ultimate vehicle for her voice and acting ability.“Almost all of Verdi’s roles, especially for mezzo-sopranos, are contradictory and bright,” she said. “Eboli contains everything — love, jealousy, agony over unrequited love, a fierce desire for revenge and attempts to influence politics — and a huge range of feelings and situations, all with great energy.”In the end, “Don Carlo” is about love and the boundaries of commitment to God and to the crown. It’s about a continuum of history, rather than what could feel like a stodgy story from nearly half a millennium ago.“Even if it’s about royals, or an old story, these are things we know from our lives now,” Ms. Davidsen said. “Do I trust you? Do I dare to live with you? Do I dare to give myself to you? What do I do with these emotions? All of these things are what we recognize, and it’s all told in such a brilliantly written opera.” More

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      Review: Lise Davidsen Shines, and Evolves, in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’

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      The radiant young soprano returned to the Metropolitan Opera to star as the Marschallin in a revival of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.”When the luminous soprano Lise Davidsen released her first solo album several years ago, she faced criticism over her repertoire.Chiefly, that while she was just in her early 30s she had chosen to record Strauss’s autumnal “Four Last Songs.” In an interview then, her characteristic geniality gave way to exasperation. “It pisses me off a little bit that you have to be a certain age to feel certain feelings,” she said. “Teenagers have all those feelings, and more, in a day.”With more measured calm, she added: “But I do believe that I’m entitled to take on those feelings, to take on the difficulties in life. That’s our job in opera.”She challenged doubters again on Monday when Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” returned to the Metropolitan Opera with Davidsen, 36, making her role debut as the Marschallin — a character more typically portrayed by seasoned grandes dames. So much so that this production, by Robert Carsen, opened in 2017 as a vehicle for Renée Fleming’s farewell to the role.Never mind that in the libretto, the Marschallin is in her early 30s. Or that Fleming was around Davidsen’s age when she first sang the part at Houston Grand Opera. But as Davidsen said of the “Four Last Songs,” a performer has every right to a role if she can persuasively “take on those feelings,” not to mention the notes. And Davidsen can, on both fronts.Davidsen excels in repertoire — mostly Wagner and Strauss — somewhere between the achingly human and the otherworldly: the saintly Elisabeth in “Tannhäuser,” the mythical title character in “Ariadne auf Naxos,” the forlorn Sieglinde in “Die Walküre.” The Marschallin, however, is entirely earthbound. In conflict with neither God nor the gods, she is simply staring down middle age and the inevitability of change.That said, the Marschallin is a woman of stature: influential, composed and well connected. Davidsen captures this naturally, exuding confidence more than wisdom, and behaving with discretion in public while reserving playfulness for the intimacy of her bedroom.When we meet the Marschallin, she has just spent the night with her 17-year-old lover, Octavian; over the course of the first act, her amorous bliss gives way to solemnity as she explains that their affair has an expiration date — “today or tomorrow, or the day after next.” When Fleming sang that line, it was with the authority of experience. But where her Marschallin looked back, Davidsen’s seems to look forward; she’s keeping it together while aware of the anxiety that sets in whenever she looks in the mirror.Throughout, Davidsen alternates between conversational restraint — enunciating each syllable of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s talky libretto with penetrating focus — and white-hot radiance. Her terms of endearment for Octavian emerge like a rising sun. And in the final trio, her sustained high A on the word “glücklich” (“happy”) soars and crescendos to a glowing benediction for her lover’s new life with Sophie.“Der Rosenkavalier” is an ensemble opera in which it can be difficult to call anyone a protagonist, but Davidsen’s Marschallin leaves the stage the most evolved. Among the lines that landed freshly on Monday was her last. With Sophie’s father, Faninal, she passes by the happy new couple. He sings, “Young people are always the same”; and she responds, “Yes, yes,” with a D sharp falling nearly an octave below to an E, as if sighing.On Monday, that moment was a reminder that while the opera often seems like the story of two generations, it is more like a tale of three: Octavian’s, the Marschallin’s and Faninal’s. With that “yes, yes,” Davidsen’s Marschallin suddenly matures, shedding the anxiety of wrinkles and lovers lost to enter the next phase of her life.Also remarkable on Monday was the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey, singing the role of Octavian at the Met for the first time. She made even bigger the mighty yet smooth sound, as well as the tireless energy and dramatic skill, that she brought to her performances last year in a “Rosenkavalier” at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. With a cherubic face she looked every bit the part of a young lover, and, with a touch of careless manspreading while lighting a cigarette, very much a boy.The baritone Brian Mulligan made a role debut, as well, as Faninal, with commanding ease and entertaining comedic instinct. And veterans of the production returned: the soprano Erin Morley, still a bright, elegant presence as Sophie; and the bass Günther Groissböck, still a dangerously handsome Baron Ochs, though more strained in this revival, his gravely low notes and declamatory articulation characterful but not always assured.Under Simone Young’s baton, the Met Orchestra improved as the evening progressed. The opening, a kind of pornography in music, was romantic where it should have been ecstatic, and a Mozartean interlude in the first act wasn’t scaled back to match the style; the dreamily glinting rose motif was more legato than lustrous. But Young effectively conjured the romping chaos of Ochs’s cohort in the second act, along with his famous waltz and the darker, “Salome”-like dancing rhythms of the third act.Carsen’s production remains the textbook-perfect staging of modern Met history: elegant and satisfyingly grand, smart but not daring. His major intervention — moving the opera’s setting from the 18th century to the year in which it premiered, 1911, from the cusp of revolutionary Europe to the brink of World War I — also remains eerily evocative.The Marschallin’s bedroom is covered in large canvases: portraits of great men, scenes from battle and court. It seems as though the walls can barely support the weight of history. In the first act, her life is saturated at a tipping point of decadence; a parade of visitors and excess — needy orphans, salespeople with the latest fashions, an attention-hungry tenor — overwhelm her, the score and the stage. By the end, the set opens up around Octavian and Sophie as they rejoice in their future together, revealing a line of soldiers charging into battle, and stumbling as they die.When the production opened in 2017, its depiction of a society blissfully unaware of the transformation ahead recalled the recent, surprise election of President Donald J. Trump. Since then, it has been redolent of much else in our time of too-muchness: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate disaster.If Carsen’s “Rosenkavalier” has staying power, it is because of this chameleonic resonance. As the Marschallin well knows, the only constant, in a forward-spinning world, is change.Der RosenkavalierThrough April 20 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More