Davidsen, Lise

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    Best Classical Performances of 2024

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    Standouts included the soprano Lise Davidsen and the Berlin Philharmonic, a new opera by Missy Mazzoli and bits of old ones by Schubert.ZACHARY WOOLFEDeathless Classics and Unmissable New OperasThe joy of a music critic’s job is how wide the purview is. From revivals of centuries-old pieces to the premieres of brand-new works, the field I cover is an ecosystem that takes pride in both the past and the future. My favorite performances this year, in chronological order, spanned eras, but all were marriages of imaginative spontaneity and meticulous craft.Trinity Wall Street’s ‘Messiah’Even after the departure of Trinity’s visionary arts director, Julian Wachner, in 2022, this has remained the most urgent, vivid version of Handel’s classic oratorio that I know of — alternately bracing and joyous. (Ryan James Brandau conducted last December.) Much credit is due to the church’s vibrant period-instrument orchestra. And rather than hosting the usual quartet of aria soloists, this performance has almost 20 soloists emerge from the exceptional in-house choir, making it more a communal rite than a stale holiday pageant. (Read our review.)Yunchan LimYunchan Lim performed Chopin’s piano études at Carnegie Hall.Chris LeeChopin’s 24 études are only an hour of music, but that hour is one of the most storied and difficult in the piano repertoire. Yunchan Lim was just 19 when he ran this old-school gantlet at Carnegie Hall in February, yet he has a thoughtfulness and maturity that belie his years. At Carnegie, as on the recording he released in April, he was unfazed by the études’ staggering technical demands as he balanced note-by-note clarity with sensitive lyricism. (Read our reviews of the concert and the recording.)Lise DavidsenOne of the best singers of her generation, this Norwegian soprano has a huge, coolly powerful voice that sails easily through the long lines of Wagner and Strauss. Verdi tends to benefit from more vulnerability and velvety warmth, but Davidsen has become an artist you want to hear in everything. In February she lavished her generosity, finesse and visceral impact on the much-suffering Leonora in the Metropolitan Opera’s forcefully played new production of “La Forza del Destino,” stopping the show with her 11-o’clock number, “Pace, pace mio Dio.” (Read our review of “La Forza del Destino.”)Cleveland OrchestraIn May, Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” was cast with fresh, youthful voices and played with elegant transparency by one of the world’s great orchestras at Severance Hall. It was the 20th opera presentation of the conductor Franz Welser-Möst’s Cleveland tenure, which will end in 2027 after a quarter-century — astonishing longevity in today’s music world. The ensemble’s Carnegie Hall visit in January with Welser-Möst was also memorable, including lucid performances of Prokofiev’s second and fifth symphonies, which ingeniously sandwiched Webern’s experiment in that genre. (Read our reviews of “The Magic Flute” and the Carnegie concert.)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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      Angelina Jolie Plays Opera Diva Maria Callas. We Went With Her to the Met.

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      The Metropolitan Opera House was awash in pearls and tuxedos on a recent gala evening. Socialites traded political gossip by the bar, and bankers discussed coming vacations in the Maldives.Then a golden elevator door slid open and a glamorous figure slipped out.Heads turned, cellphones clumsily emerged and people began to talk. Is that really her? What is she doing here? She seems taller in person. Look at those tattoos!I had invited Angelina Jolie to the Met to see a performance of Puccini’s “Tosca” ahead of the release of “Maria,” a new film starring Jolie as opera’s defining diva, Maria Callas.Jolie and Larraín at the Met. “There’s an authenticity here that is beautiful,” Jolie said. “There’s a poetry to it all.”Jolie is one of the most recognizable people on the planet, commanding attention wherever she goes. But her night at the opera got off to a bumpy start. She had a problem with her dress, a black, floor-length Yves Saint Laurent with a velvet cape. (The seamstresses in the Met’s costume shop were summoned, but Jolie soldiered on without help.) And when I met her in the foyer, she seemed to be having last-minute doubts about me shadowing her, saying it might spoil the experience.“I just want to enjoy the evening,” she told me. “I want to take it all in.” More

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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