This of course makes it easier to sing, but there’s more mystery and atmosphere in the music than Gardner and Davidsen realize here. Her Luonnotar is beautiful, but just a hair too fast. Let’s hope her current popularity doesn’t result in a premature vocal blowout. She’s the real deal, an intelligent and affecting singer with the vocal heft and secure technique to do justice to just about anything she tries. Soprano Lise Davidsen seems to be all over the place these days. Here’s a mostly excellent disc, smartly programmed to offer an appealing mix of familiar and less-known music. The programme is completed by a pair of much earlier works, Rakastava (the Lover) and Vårsång (Spring Song). The tone poem Tapiola, from 1926, is Sibelius’ last great masterpiece and evokes the forests of his native Finland. Its virtuosic demands are ably met here by award-wining soprano Lise Davidsen, who also feature in the Suite from Pelléas and Mélisande, music re-worked by Sibelius from his incidental music written for the first performances of Maeterlinck’s play in Helsinki, in 1905, in Swedish. Written in 1913 for the diva Aino Ackté, the tone poem Luonnotar draws on text from the Finnish national epic poem, the Kalevala. Following their acclaimed recordings of Schoenberg with Sara Jakubiak and Britten’s Peter Grimes with Stuart Skelton, Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic turn their attention to the music of Sibelius.
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