You have reached a certain status as a singer when you are granted a ‘Christmas With’ album. As far back as I can remember we have had Christmas with Mario Lanza, Christmas with Leontyne Price, Christmas with Pavarotti, let alone Christmases with the likes of Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby et al. This, in all but the title, is Christmas with Lise Davidsen, the Norwegian dramatic soprano de nos jours, a genuinely touching, warm-hearted and classy example of the genre – and more imaginative in the choice of repertoire than most. It’s not every Christmas disc that has Wolf’s ‘Schlafendes Jesuskind’ (from Mörike Lieder). None, I think, will have the quartet of Scandinavian Christmas songs in which Davidsen is joined by the Norwegian National Opera Children’s Choir. All are outstanding, and sung in beautiful, unshowy arrangements by the disc’s conductor, Christian Eggen. In Mitt hjerte alltid vanker (‘My heart always wanders’) he introduces into the mix a Swedish nyckelharpa, an ancient bowed folk instrument likened by British writer Andrew Brown to ‘an accordion on the verge of tears’.

The arrangements of the more familiar fare on the album were, interestingly, made for some of Davidsen’s distinguished predecessors on the Decca label, among them Kiri Te Kanawa, Eileen Farrell and the aforesaid Pavarotti and Leontyne Price. Davidsen’s glorious voice floats majestically above the excellent Norwegian Radio Orchestra with its deep, rich strings, doing them full justice and making even The First Nowell powerfully expressive. Sometimes in the English texts I could have wished for crisper consonants to aid clarity, but the booklet is there to assist when necessary.

Davidsen bookends the programme with not one but two accounts of the ubiquitous Cantique de Noël. To be fair, the first one is sung in Swedish. Doing so at Christmas Eve services in her hometown of Stokke when still in high school was what fired her ambition to become a singer. She was still going back to do so in her late twenties and well into her career. That profound connection with her past is well conveyed on this album, one of its many bonuses.