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.
That isn’t really Davidsen. On Tuesday, she seemed flummoxed by the range and activity the character requires, and her Tosca retreated into a kind of chilly poise. In the first act, she didn’t register playfulness, coyness, jealousy or simple happiness; in the second, seductiveness, calculation, terror or imperiousness.
She gestured toward anger and pain, helped by the laser slice of her high notes, and there were passing moments of endearing subtlety. But the emotions didn’t feel fully inhabited, so “Vissi d’arte,” the aria Tosca sings at her lowest moment, was honorable, not wrenching, without warm richness in the middle of the vocal range. Her voice, which comes across in other repertoire as luminous, felt overly stark.
Davidsen seemed more engaged in the third act, a positive sign for the rest of her run in the role. (She returns to the Met as Leonore in Beethoven’s “Fidelio” in March, and the next few years bring grander, more abstract heroines of the type she has flourished singing, including Wagner’s Isolde and Brünnhilde.)
Part of the problem on Tuesday was her lack of chemistry with the genial tenor Freddie De Tommaso, making his Met debut as Cavaradossi with a hearty sound and an “E lucevan le stelle” gratuitously dotted with sobs. Far more imposing was the baritone Quinn Kelsey, fresh from his haunting portrayal of Verdi’s Rigoletto. With his capacious, hooded tone, he was a Scarpia of rare charm and erotic charge.
On the podium, Yannick Nézet-Séguin engaged in some push-and-pull over tempos with Davidsen at the start of her duet with Cavaradossi. But Nézet-Séguin generally sank lovingly into this luscious score, relishing it to the point of sometimes lingering too long.
A side effect of that was to give the space for the bass-baritone Patrick Carfizzi to really sing his handful of lines as the Sacristan. Carfizzi is a Met stalwart; even if Tosca isn’t the best fit for Davidsen, we can be glad that she is, too.
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