Limelight’s Editor meets the American Turandot all set to be the next Aussie Brünnhilde.

Having recently seen Lise Lindstrom nail the title role of Puccini’s Turandot in Opera Australia’s excellent revival I’m anxious. We’re meeting at a Sydney restaurant but I have another interview scheduled just after and I’ve left no time to eat. Will she fix me with that icy stare, condemn me for a cheap date and demand my head? As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. Like many of her operatic compatriots, the American soprano with the nerves of steel and the voice of silver turns out to be charming, enthusiastic, unpretentious and enormous fun.

A Californian by birth, it helps that she was exposed to music young – her mother was an Eastman school of music voice graduate who quit performing to marry and have children and went into education. “I was like having PT Barnum at home,” Lindstrom chuckles – the first of many laughs in a pleasantly humorous hour. “She was the ringleader for the entire high school. She would go to work early in the morning, teach all day, and then she would be there all night for...