Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen taking on new challenges on two continents

NEW YORK — Embarking on her most ambitious season yet, Lise Davidsen is giving a solo recital at the Metropolitan Opera, making her Carnegie Hall debut, and performing three major roles she’s never sung in staged productions. One of her early roles was the title character in Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,″ and when she performed it at the Met, Zachary Woolfe wrote in The New York Times that her sound was so “arrestingly powerful and visceral” that “you feel it as almost physical presence — pressing against your chest, raising the hairs on the back of your neck.” This past season, however, another aspect of her artistry came to the fore as she took on parts that called for a more nuanced approach. “For me the extraordinary part of her performance was her musicality,” Gelb said, “and though she has a voice that is literally more powerful than any other singer you could hear on the stage of the Met, she was able to modulate her singing so that she didn’t blow the other singers off the stage.” A few months later she took on the role of Elisabeth of Valois in Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Royal Opera House in London, and won raves for her dramatic intensity as well as her singing — particularly the many soft high notes the part requires. While she’s in rehearsal in New York, she’ll appear at Carnegie Hall for the first time, singing Wagner’s “Wesendonck Lieder,” songs that contain thematic material he would later use in “Tristan und Isolde.” Then it’s on to Paris for one of the highest-profile roles for any soprano, Strauss’ “Salome.” The one-act opera ends with a solo lasting more than 15 minutes sung to the severed head of John the Baptist. As she tells it, he had gone to London’s Royal Opera House to hear star German tenor Jonas Kaufmann singing in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” Kaufmann’s co-star happened to be a certain Norwegian soprano.