Recording of the Week, Christmas from Norway

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a festive album from a star opera-singer, to rephrase Jo March a little. Recent years have seen Diana Damrau, Jonas Kaufmann, Plácido Domingo and Juan Diego Flórez stepping up to the mark (with varying degrees of success), and this time round it’s the Norwegian lyric-dramatic soprano Lise Davidsen’s turn to welcome yule with a supremely classy programme which tips the cap to some of her illustrious predecessors on Decca as well as to her own Scandinavian heritage.

I must admit to a little twinge of disappointment when I first heard that Davidsen’s big recording project of 2023 would be a Christmas album, purely because it ruled out the chance to hear her in more orchestral songs or some of her new operatic roles any time soon: I’d read unanimously glowing reports of her debuts as Strauss’s Marschallin, Janáček’s Jenůfa and Elisabetta in Verdi’s Don Carlo earlier this year, yet somehow managed to miss the lot. But it turns out that this thoughtfully-programmed, luxuriously-performed disc provides plenty of opportunity to enjoy all of the qualities which make Davidsen such a special artist: the integrity and sincerity of her singing, her ability to hone that big glorious voice down to a shimmering thread, and of course the thrilling power she can generate at full-throttle.

It’s become traditional for singers to enthuse that Christmas is the most wonderful time of their year and/or that music has always been at the heart of their festive season whenever they have one of these albums to promote, but for Davidsen the connection goes a little deeper: as she explains in a rather lovely video, it was at a nativity-play that she sang her first-ever solo and realised that this might be something she could pursue, and she also points out that Christmas has a special significance for those living in a part of the world which sees very little daylight for several months.

Like Damrau last Christmas, Davidsen wisely stays in her lane in terms of repertoire-choices: no ill-advised covers of Mariah Carey or Wham! here, just a tasteful selection of traditional carols, seasonal art-songs and a smattering of Baroque chestnuts. The album opens in grand style with Adolphe Adam’s 'O Holy Night', sung in Swedish in the lavish arrangement which Douglas Gamley made for Pavarotti back in the 1970s (and also served Joseph Calleja well last year). Davidsen’s opulent voice rides the plush sound of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra with ease, and that climactic high B flat (which fans of the sitcom Frasier may remember caused Martin Crane and his neighbours such grief in one of the show’s most-loved Christmas episodes) will raise every hair on the back of your neck.

Humperdinck’s charming Weihnachten (orchestrated by Charles Mackerras) comes off beautifully, delivered with the same controlled exuberance which Davidsen brings to her signature-aria from Wagner’s Tannhäuser; the rich, brass-heavy orchestrations of Wolf’s ‘Schlafendes Jesuskind’ and ‘Deilig er Jorden’ a little later on also call the sound-world of that opera to mind, and Davidsen responds in kind.

She’s equally affecting when painting with finer brush-strokes in Reger’s lovely ‘Mariä Wiegenlied’ and the arrangements of ‘Silent Night’ and the Bach/Gounod 'Ave Maria' (made for Kiri Te Kanawa and Leontyne Price respectively), and a nicely rumbustious account of Bach’s ‘Jesu bleibet meine Freude’ reminds us that Davidsen started her journey as a Baroque mezzo and can still field the sort of clean steady tone that this music requires (I’d still love to hear her in a full Handel role one day – perhaps a full-fat Rodelina or Alcina?).

But the highlight of the album is an enormously touching sequence of four Scandinavian carols: Gustaf Nordqvist’s gently contemplative ‘Jul, jul, strålande jul’, that rather Wagnerian ‘Deilig er Jorden’, the folk-tune ‘Mitt hjerte alltid vanker’, and Sibelius’s ever-so-slightly spicy arrangement of ‘Julvisa’ (a simple Lutheran hymn extolling the virtues of poverty and obedience). Davidsen does it all with an unaffected warmth that would thaw the heart of Ebenezer Scrooge himself, before closing things out with the English-language version of 'O Holy Night' – so good that they recorded it twice.