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Lise Davidsen: The Queen of New York New York
Carnegie Hall
06/05/2026 - & May 23 (Girona), 24 (Madrid), 29 (Bergen), 31, June 2 (London), 13 (Snape), October 23 (St. Paul), November 7 (Vienna), 12 (Geneva), 15 (Paris), 2026
Franz Schubert: Selected Songs
Lise Davidsen (soprano), James Baillieu (piano)
L. Davidsen (© Fredrik Arff)
In no city in the world are the movements of a star tracked more assiduously today than those of Lise Davidsen in New York. A reigning international soprano of unusual force and equally outstanding height, she is just off a successful run as Wagner’s Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera, where she will return in September to open the new season in her company role debut as Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s first Shakespearean opera. Her Carnegie Hall debut, an all‑Schubert program assiduously accompanied by the insightful pianist James Baillieu, was a late‑season must‑attend for musical New York.
Rather surprisingly, some seats were empty as the music started, and their numbers increased after the interval. The program may have had something to do with it. Davidsen has said Schubert is her favorite composer, but both locally and globally, she is much better known for her high dramatic opera roles. Schubert’s vocal writing, especially in his song cycles, anticipated that tradition, especially in German opera, but the program was uneven in both emotion and vocal demands.
The first half was dark and somber, dominated by songs about death and suffering, even if it started out pleasantly enough with a virtuous hymn to nature in Am Bach im Frühling. Some of the sounds also came off a bit throaty as her ascents put pressure on the stability of her high notes. The treacherous key changes in Ganymed and the Faustian angst of Gretchen am Spinnrade, songs based on Goethe, strained with vibrato in ascents that did not feature the voice to its best advantage. As Davidsen proceeded, thematic darkness took over. By the time she approached the interval, Der Tod und das Mädchen resounded so darkly that people shuffled toward the exit, with some muttering about needing a drink and at least one Manhattan lady remarking that she would prefer to spend the rest of the evening at home watching a championship basketball game.
In fairness, that lady and others who departed would not have been disappointed had they stayed. The second part was much brighter, and its selections served Davidsen’s voice significantly better. Der Musensohn, based on a Goethe poem about a dancing servant of the muses who proclaims nature’s beauty, started the second part with welcome relief. Friedrich Rückert’s poem of teenage infatuation, Lachen und Weinen, likewise resounded beautifully from the lighter side of Davidsen’s refined instrument. Nature and devotion came together with alluring artistry in Die junge Nonne, a setting of a nun’s memory of her devotion to God against a raging storm.
The evening’s finest singing came in the final two songs, the memorably haunting Erlkönig, again from Goethe, which tells of a father who is unable to save his son from nocturnal spirits, and Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen, a poetic memory by Johann Georg Jacobi evoking Schubert’s lost mother during a solemn walk through a cemetery. Both songs were out of step with the second part’s lighter theme, but this did not detract from the raw beauty of Davidsen’s artistry.
Davidsen generously gave two encores, again both from Schubert–An die Musik and An die Natur. These familiar set pieces came off with virtuosity but sounded a bit programmatic after the great thrills of the earlier pieces.
Paul du Quenoy
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