I often wonder if the ongoing pandemic is making my world bigger or smaller. The new album by the magnificent soprano Lise Davidsen compels me to reexamine the question. While I haven’t touched my passport during the past 24 months, I’ve become increasingly dedicated to reading literature, studying history and furthering my musical literacy.
Scouting potential day trips from Kansas City about a year ago, I considered driving to the site of Willa Cather’s family homestead in Nebraska. I reckoned I should first familiarize myself with her work. What began as a casual investigation quickly became an obsession. I’ve since read almost everything she published.
Opera, another of my nascent infatuations, figures heavily in Cather’s 1915 novel The Song of the Lark. Although she rose to fame after the novel’s publication and was of Norwegian rather than Swedish descent, the opera star Kristen Flagstad served as my proxy for Cather’s protagonist Thea Kronberg. A few of Flagstad’s vintage recordings of Grieg are astonishingly vibrant.
So while I’m still little more than an enthusiastic greenhorn, "Møte" and "En Svane" are among the repertoire on Davidsen and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes’ exquisite Edvard Grieg that were previously familiar to me. I’m having an unreasonably good time comparing Flagstad’s approach to Grieg to Davidsen’s. My soundtrack for the Red Cloud road trip is set.