Lise Davidsen Wins Female Singer Of The Year At 2021 Opera Awards

Soprano Lise Davidsen won Female Singer of the Year at the 2021 International Opera Awards last night. She also made her La Scala debut, in the reopening concert, marking the 75th anniversary of the reopening of the Milan opera house after World War Two bombings. The concert, conducted by Maestro Riccardo Chailly, featured works by Verdi, Wagner, Purcell, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss performed for around 500 masked people watching from the surrounding boxes.

Since winning Plácido Domingo’s Operalia and Queen Sonja competitions in 2015, Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen has taken the classical music world by storm, with resounding debuts in venues including Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Bayreuth, Aix-enProvence and Glyndebourne Festivals, Bayerische Staatsoper, Wigmore Hall and the Barbican, Wiener Staatsoper, the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall and Zurich Opera House.

Lise Davidsen’s self-titled debut album of Strauss and Wagner songs, released in 2019, entered the Official UK Classical Artist Chart at No. 1. She released her second studio album, Beethoven • Wagner • Verdi, featuring some of the great operatic heroines from German and Italian repertoire and Wagner’s five Wesendonck Lieder which has become a signature piece for Lise, in March 2021.

“Not just a voice. The Voice”

Few young singers have received such critical acclaim as Lise Davidsen. The New York Times announced she has, “Not just a voice. The Voice,” and Gramophone noted she has, “One of the greatest voices to be heard today.”

Lise Davidsen will reopen the Bayerische Staatsoper on 13 May 2021, with Jonas Kaufmann, as Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre. She will also perform as Elisabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and as Sieglinde in Die Walküre, at the Bayreuther Festspiele in July and August before performing as Eva in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in October and November.

The International Opera Awards

The International Opera Awards, considered opera’s answer to the Oscars, celebrate achievements in opera around the globe over the last calendar year in a wide range of categories. After 2020’s live ceremony was forced off stage by the pandemic, the online event celebrated work done in 2019 while also paying tribute to the resilience of the opera world during the pandemic in 2020.

Opera Company of the year was presented to the Teatro Real Madrid, Mexican tenor Javier Camarena won Male Singer of the Year, and American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton won Opera Magazine’s Readers’ Award.

The full list of winners can be found below:

CHORUS
Metropolitan Opera

CONDUCTOR
Kirill Petrenko

DESIGNER
Małgorzata Szczęśniak

DIRECTOR
Robert Carsen

EDUCATION & OUTREACH
Birmingham Opera Company

FEMALE SINGER
Lise Davidsen

FESTIVAL
Salzburg Festival

LEADERSHIP sponsored by the Good Governance Institute
David Pountney

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
Bernard Haitink

MALE SINGER
Javier Camarena

NEW PRODUCTION
Tale of Tsar Saltan (Tcherniakov, La Monnaie De Munt)

NEWCOMER
Alpesh Chauhan

OPERA COMPANY
Teatro Real, Madrid

OPERA FOR PEACE PRIZE
Denyce Graves

OPERA ORCHESTRA
Bayerisches Staatsorchester / Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich

PHILANTHROPY
Martina Arroyo Foundation

RECORDING (SOLO RECITAL)
Jakub Józef Orliński: Facce d’amore (Erato)

RECORDING (COMPLETE OPERA)
Thomas: Hamlet (Naxos) [DVD]

OPERA MAGAZINE READERS’ AWARD
Jamie Barton

REDISCOVERED WORK
Moniuszko: Paria (Teatr Wielki, Poznań)

WORLD PREMIERE
Glanert: Oceane (Deutsche Oper, Berlin)

YOUNG SINGER sponsored by Mazars
Xabier Anduaga
Vasilisa Berzhanskaya

Lise Davidsen’s album Beethoven • Wagner • Verdi can be bought here.

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