The acclaimed arrival of Lise Davidsen, both in the opera house and on disc and with much overlap into Lehmann’s home territory, made me curious about sampling the rate and direction of evolution and the mutation of species—between Lehmann’s earliest records and the recent Davidsen releases (one aria-and-song recital and one complete role),104 years have passed. By sheer chance of the order of acquisition, I listened to Davidsen’s solo disc, on Decca, first. Of course, we are no longer on the little planet of early electrical monophonic studio sound, or of the singer-friendly juxtaposition of voice with underpersoned orchestra—which between them give us a close-up of Lehmann’s singing but a limited sense of its impact under opera-house performance conditions—but in the outer-space surround of contemporary digital stereo, where all is hyper-real and we simultaneously luxuriate but lose our grasp. We are also no longer concerned about the duration of recorded sides, or surface scratch or crackle, and are hearing not Odeon’s assemblages of Berlin instrumentalists under worthy musicians, but the Philharmonia under one of our podium stars, Esa-Pekka Salonen. So adjustment is required, and I was glad I’d heard Davidsen live, for some real-world grounding. For sure, this is a roomy, open-throated voice of beautiful quality that should guarantee its owner a prominent place for years to come. But by ten minutes or so into her program, and with the long-familiar voices of Lehmann and Rethberg fresh in my ear, she had driven me to the edge of madness with her habit of burrowing into her onsets by straightening the tone for half or more of a note’s time value before allowing vibrato to bring some sense of living humanity to the music. It was as if all the worst practices of our Neo-Baroque school of manners had been tossed in a bowl with those of 1950s American pop crooners, then dumped into the capacious receptacle of this splendid Scandinavian Modern instrument. The effect is of a persistent affectation, a withholding; the worry is that there is an underlying insecurity that leads the singer to pull away from simply connecting one vibrated tone to the next to begin stitching together an honest line.

There had been moments of this approach in Davidsen’s Lisa, but with nowhere near such constancy, and I’d put it down to an effort to evoke Mournful Russian Soul. Also noted in her live performance, but more evident here, is a sense of picking her way gingerly from note to note, as if not wanting to leave a legible footprint, and a tendency to render repeated notes on the same pitch (as in the center section of “Dich, teure Halle” or at “In den schönen Feierkleidern,”  etc. in “Es gibt ein Reich“) by nudging each with a little bump, instead of pinning them onto a genuine sostenuto. In the four Strauss songs of Op. 27, of which the great Ruhe, meine Seele is in my opinion the only one to benefit from its orchestration (and it sounds wonderful here), we get more of the same, a phrase or two starting well, then reverting to the default onset described above, and in the more up-tempo songs (Cäcilie and Heimliche Aufforderung), the voice episodically emerging from the orchestral welter to briefly soar, then politely step back. In general, the lower octave of the voice seems to not penetrate very well, the vowels darkened and tucked in; then the sound opens out at the top, and when she unleashes it, the effect is impressive. Interpretively, there’s a sensitivity to purely musical effects, but not much in the way of imaginative inflection; it’s all somewhat abstract.