Recording of the Week, Grieg from Lise Davidsen and Leif Ove Andsnes

It may seem a little premature to start making Recordings of the Year predictions a mere seven days into 2022, but if I hear many vocal recitals to rival this one over the next twelve months then I’ll count myself very fortunate indeed. It’s one of those albums where the synergy between the two artists and their mutual affinity with the repertoire combine to spellbinding effect - and if the Norwegian soprano’s first two solo albums showcased a voice of thrilling dramatic potential, this one reveals an artist now in complete control of its vast range of expressive possibilities.

It’s Davidsen’s first full-length song-recital on disc, and how wonderful it is to hear her in this more intimate context after those first two barnstorming recordings of orchestral songs and operatic arias (glorious though they were). This may be a voice that’s destined for Isolde and Brünnhilde, but like her countrywoman Kirsten Flagstad she’s also capable of the utmost delicacy and refinement when painting on a smaller canvas – and Andsnes backs her to the hilt throughout, revelling in the passages where she unleashes the full firepower of her upper register but never obscuring the vocal line in the many magical moments where she tapers the sound to a fine silvery thread.

The pair open with the song-cycle Haugtussa, an extraordinary work which provides ample opportunity to enjoy Davidsen in full cry as well as in introspective mode. Charting a young herding-girl’s journey from lusty first love to desolation beside a babbling, ominously beckoning brook, it plays out rather like an earthier, female-voiced Schöne Müllerin - and as British soprano Claire Booth remarked in a recent Presto interview, testifies to Grieg’s gift for creating fully-rounded, complex women in his songs at a time when many composers (and the poets whose texts they set) only scratched the surface on this front.

Davidsen grasps the nettle with an emotional candour and boldness that’s often quite disconcerting: listen, for instance, to the fierce sensuality which she brings to the fifth song, Elsk (‘Love’), in which the ‘mountain-maid’ fantasises about being ‘bound with cords so tight they burn’ by her lover and casting a spell which would allow her to ‘grow inside [him] and be one’ with him. Frauenliebe it ain’t.

She and Andsnes bring plenty of fresh-faced, out-of-doors vigour to the more straightforwardly bucolic songs Blåbær-Li (‘Blueberry Slope’) and Killingsdans (‘Kidlings’ Dance’) - where Davidsen sounds eminently more capable of actually herding cattle and scaring off predatory bears than the delightfully skittish Anne Sofie von Otter on her wonderful 1990s recording with Bengt Forsberg – and the final, devastated lament by the brook is delivered with heart-breaking pathos by both.

The Five Songs by Otto Benzon also spring plenty of surprises in terms of structure and content, with an elegy over a mother’s grave (where Davidsen’s solemn, stark eloquence and weighty lower-middle register combine to profoundly moving effect) sitting cheek-by-jowl with a jaunty apostrophe to a snail – there’s a twist in the tale here, as the singer eventually realises that perhaps the recalcitrant mollusc is happier staying in his shell, and Davidsen’s wistful tenderness and empathy here ensure that the moral of the story hits home without seeming unduly laboured. And I loved the heartfelt but unsentimental address to a sleeping child in Til min Dreng, where Davidsen gets the balance between prosaic, conversational musings and poetic flights of fancy just right.

Other highlights include a rip-roaring account of the exuberant Og jeg vil ha mig en Hjertenskjær, where Davidsen’s big, bright voice takes on a trouser-role-ish swagger to portray the swashbuckling young man lusting after showy new clothes and a pretty woman for Midsummer Eve, an exceptionally graceful portrait of Ibsen’s Swan, and a luminous account of Gruss (the first of the Six Songs Op. 48, all included here), with Davidsen finding appropriately silvery colours to match Andsnes’s ‘sweet sound of bells’.

Recorded up by the Arctic Circle in Bodø, this is ideal listening for these dark January evenings, especially given that a fair amount of the repertoire extols the joys of imminent spring – but given the quality of both programming and performances, I think this one will be on my playlist all year round.