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Czech Songs: Magdalena Kožená (Pentatone)
★★★★★
🎧 Apple |
The primary we heard of Magdalena Kožená was a mid-Nineteen Nineties album of Bach arias, recorded when she was 22. The voice was directly mild and darkish — assume Emma Kirkby in a John Le Carre novel. Provided that Kirkby and Co had coated many of the Baroque, it was exhausting to see the place an unknown from Brno would go. Kožená put in a yr on the Vienna Volksoper and that was so far as she went on the traditional profession path, past occasional performances and opera productions. Now 50, Kozena is understood extra as a recording artist than a dwell performer. Married to the conductor Sir Simon Rattle, she lives in Berlin and is chooses her repertoire with care.
Listening to her new launch, one has to marvel on the unpredictable manner a voice matures. From mild in weight and darkish in color, the tone has deepened and rounded — assume Brigitte Fassbaender with added gravitas. There are moments on this programme the place she may very well be Jenufa or Katya in Janacek’s operas. At different factors she is sort of within the vary of Schoenberg or Berg.
The songs she chooses are surprising — a set of Japanese songs by Bohuslav Martinu, probably the least carried out nice composer of recent occasions — some juvenilia by Antonin Dvorak and fragments by Hans Krasa and Gidon Klein, two Jewish composers who have been murdered within the Nazi Holocaust.
The Martinu songs are nothing just like the faux-orientalisms confected by Debussy and Ravel. They’re as Czech as Pilsen beer, with out a side-order of sushi. Martinu is drawing curlicues on an imported tradition that he might have seen via a store window. His Japan is solely imagined, a fantasy that Kožená embraces to its fullness.
Dvorak’s songs are bucolic jingles of the type Brahms may need utilized in his Bohemian Rhapsody. Krasa’s strategy is determinedly fashionable, borderline Lulu. Klein’s lullaby additionally has a Hebrew title, that means ‘sleep my son’.
The tour Kožená takes from Martinu’s Nippon via Dvorak’s Moravia to the tragic histories of two Terezin composers admirably calibrated. Shock and rigidity develop all through the hour. The Czech Phiharmonic, Rattle conducting, supply intuitive sustenance in immaculate Pentatone sound. That is probably the most vivid recital disc I’ve heard all yr.
To learn extra from Norman Lebrecht, subscribe to Slippedisc.com.
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Norman Lebrecht is among the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s a daily presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Avenue Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning towards human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
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