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RECITAL REVIEW
January 29, 2004
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By Stephanie Friedman
Only in the final set of her program, Shostakovich's Satires, Opus 109, did mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozená make her impressive mark. Up to that point in her Herbst Theatre recital Thursday evening, the singer had revealed vocal faults and interpretive shortcomings that make her international reputation somewhat puzzling.
Kozená is young and attractive: svelte, stylish, and only eight years or so out of her formal training. But that formal training should surely have taught her to breathe properly, from the middle of the body, not, as she did, with her upper chest, which made her raise her shoulders when taking a breath, and caused her tone to sound forced and harsh much of the time. Her body, long and sinuous, accentuated this fault, remaining largely uninvolved in her singing, and what few gestures she had added little to the songs.
Ravel's Histoires naturelles (Nature Stories), for example, a series of beautifully etched portraits of various animals, needs unfettered bodily movements and imaginative facial expressions to animate the humorous, arch sketch of, say, “Le paon” (The peacock) or “Le pintade” (The Guinea-Fowl). But Kozená's peacock failed to strut, and her humpbacked guinea-hen wasn't imperious and nasty. A little bit of proper gesturing would have gone a long way to denote overweening pride or unbridled temper. Certainly more was needed than Kozená's grimly set mouth — an expression that she used often for emotions ranging from amusement to anger — or pointedly jutting chin, which seemed to be part of her stage posture.
Kozená was awarded the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2003, but that cannot have been for her grasp of French style. Though her diction and languages, including French, were fine, she seemed not to understand how to make a suave, legato entrance over the piano in a line like “Et je suis sūr qu'il ne s'est pas envolé de peur” (And I am sure that he did not fly away out of fear) from “Le martin-p'cheur” (The Kingfisher). Rather, here as elsewhere, she entered tentatively and without apparent awareness of what the music was about. Kozená's tendency to push her tone was evident from the start in a set of folk songs by Bohuslav Martinu. These are simple songs that might be sung by a child. Kozená, though, seemed to want to make them more complex than they were; her voice was inappropriately weighty. In these songs, though, she also exhibited the first of her beautiful, rich low tones, especially on an “e” vowel. All the more pity that so much of the rest of her singing sounded shrill and forced. Three selections from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn) were especially disappointing. In “Urlicht” (Primal Light), Kozená's eerily soft dynamic was so distant-sounding it might have been coming from the next room, but it also sounded unsupported and markedly different from the rest of her voice. Several times she stopped phonating before the ends of words, flattening the tone. “Lob des hohen Verstands” (In Praise of Higher Understanding), about the donkey who adjudicates the singing contest between the cuckoo and the nightingale, lacked the persona of the singer who tells the story. Mahler's descriptive “hee-haws” in both voice and piano were amusing enough, but the narrator must hold herself apart from the parody and give the listener a point of view. “Rheinlegendchen” (Little Rhine Legend) was marred by high breathing, absence of color (a few deliciously insinuating lines would have been welcome), and insufficient contrast between differing sections of the song.
The Dvorák In Folk Tone, Opus 73, were lovely settings, by the composer, of folk songs. Here singer and pianist began to work in partnership. But it was in the final set of Shostakovich songs that musical style, vocal quality, and cooperation between piano and voice fused in a masterful interpretation of these biting, savagely humorous, vivid creations. They hurt, and they are meant to. The stridency that had made no sense of the Ravel now served these songs perfectly, giving voice to their mordancy. The singer was in full possession of the telling irony and purposeful bite that the songs required. Martineau pounded away magnificently at the piano, and the singer held her own with authoritative pungency. It's difficult to single out any of the five settings of poet Sascha Chyorny (pen-name of Alexander Glikberg), nor even to adequately characterize them. They must be heard to be appreciated, and there cannot be many singers who can give as gripping and truthful a performance as we heard from Kozená. For encores, she sang Dvorák's “Songs My Mother Taught Me,” Janácek's “Stalost,” and, in a performance that unfortunately incorporated all the singer's previous defects, Duparc's “Chanson Triste” (Sad Song).
(Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, is retired from more than three decades of singing in opera and concert, here and abroad.)
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Magdalena Kozená