Lise Davidsen

Since winning Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition four years ago, Norwegian lyric soprano Lise Davidsen has taken the classical world by storm. “It’s a long time since a singer has caused such a stir,” wrote Gramophone in its review of her debut album for Decca. “She is among the greatest vocal talents to have emerged in recent years, if not decades,” the specialist magazine judged on the occasion of her Strauss and Wagner recordings, released on May 31, 2019. Lise Davidsen signed an exclusive contract with Decca in May 2018. With the Philharmonia Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen, she recorded Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs and other orchestral songs, as well as Elisabeth’s arias from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. The album also features a magnificent interpretation of the aria “Es gibt ein Reich” from Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Given her unusually full and warm voice and her rare musical sensibility and emotionality, it’s no surprise that Davidsen is in such high demand. When she debuted in the title role of Ariadne auf Naxos at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017, she received outstanding reviews, followed by numerous invitations. “One could only congratulate oneself on having been there,” commented The Times (London). The following year, her career received further impetus when she performed in Verdi’s Requiem at the BBC Proms, presented Strauss Lieder with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra and Vasily Petrenko at her first appearance at the Edinburgh International Festival, or took on various smaller roles in the Ring des Nibelungen at her Royal Opera House debut. In July 2019, Lise Davidsen will make her Bayreuth Festival debut as Elisabeth in a new production of Tannhäuser. She made her role debut in March at the Zurich Opera House, and in May she sang the part again at the Bavarian State Opera. Her summer schedule includes a return to the BBC Proms in August, where she will sing Strauss’s Four Last Songs with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Salonen. Highlights of her 2019/20 season include her debut at the New York Metropolitan Opera in Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame in November. In the new year, she will sing Wagner’s Sieglinde in concert performances of the first act of Die Walküre with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Fabio Luisi, before embodying her first leading role at Covent Garden as Jonas Kaufmann’s partner in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Lise Davidsen was born in February 1987 in the rural town of Stokke. As a teenager, she began playing guitar and singing, with Joni Mitchell and especially Eva Cassidy as her role models. Initially, she sang in choirs as a mezzo-soprano but was persuaded to switch to soprano after beginning her studies at the Grieg Academy in Bergen. “The voice tells you something in its own way… You just have to follow it,” she recalls. After graduating from the Grieg Academy in 2010, Davidsen studied at the Opera Academy in Copenhagen and had her first appearances at the Royal Danish Opera there. Her international breakthrough came in July 2015 with her victory at Operalia, where Plácido Domingo praised her “phenomenal, dramatic” voice, and the following month she won first prize at the International Queen Sonja Music Competition in Norway. In 2018, Gramophone named her “Young Artist of the Year,” and she is also the recipient of prestigious awards such as the Léonie Sonning Talent Prize and the Queen Ingrid Prize 2018. June 2019