There’s a particular quality of hush that falls just occasionally over a packed concert hall. It’s the sound of expectation: of listeners hoping for enchantment. And it was present from the moment that Lise Davidsen walked on stage with her accompanist James Baillieu to open her debut recital at the Barbican. Yes, the Norwegian soprano has been feted as a rising star ever since winning two major competitions in 2015 – but it takes more than a one-to-watch label to keep a large audience holding its breath throughout a substantial programme.

Ironically enough, perhaps the most memorable feature of Davidsen’s unforgettable voice is that she rarely seems to breathe at all. Much of this recital was a masterclass in seamless lyricism. Songs by Brahms, Schumann, Sibelius, Grieg and Strauss – Davidsen spun them all into fine, luscious streams of melody, her upper notes clarion (fearsomely powerful even at the back of the Barbican Hall’s stalls), the rest intensely, darkly full-bodied.

It’s an undeniably compelling sound. And there were moments when Davidsen’s gift for storytelling – every word of German and Finnish distinct (and the entire programme performed from memory), musical phrases delivered with an intimacy and ease improbable in such a cavernous space – really did cast a spell. There were subtle, strange shifts of tone colour in Sibelius’s Luonnotar, addictively intense crescendos through the climaxes of Strauss’s Op 39 song Befreit and an irresistible straightforwardness – almost naivety – in Brahms’s Von ewiger Liebe.

Yet there was also a hint of sameness: a gathering suspicion that whether singing Schumann or Brahms, Grieg or Sibelius, Davidsen currently uses her magnificent instrument in a relatively restricted range of ways. A more detailed, differentiated approach will, one assumes of such a talent, come with time.

At the piano, Baillieu was a beautifully matched “partner in crime” (Davidsen’s phrase, in one of several disarmingly sweet spoken introductions), with quicksilver fingers in Grieg, a delicious flexibility of tempo in Strauss and delicately balanced sound throughout. And in the closing bars of Strauss’s Morgen (their second encore), he provided the most breathtaking touch of all – suspending time and allowing silence itself to speak.