Magdalena Kožená: Love and Longing

Loving and Longing Unadorned

Jason Victor Serinus on July 13, 2012
Magdalena Kožená: Love and Longing
Magdalena Kožená: Love and Longing

Music of love and longing plays to mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená’s strengths. Her core sound and delivery — slightly dry, even, and direct; capable of passionate utterance; but without the ravishing shine, chesty depth, ringing highs, and distinctive timbre of several leading mezzos of current or recent provenance — works especially well with romantic music that speaks from the heart.

Kožená’s latest CD, Love and Longing, convinces with its unadorned, sincere approach to Dvorák’s 10 Biblical Songs, Ravel’s Shéhérazade, and Mahler’s five Rückert Lieder. Recorded in live performance, with her case well advanced by her husband, Simon Rattle, conducting his Berlin Philharmonic, she is at her best singing in her native language.

Listen To The Music

Dvorák. Final song, "Sing unto the Lord a new song"

Final song of Sheherazade

Mahler Ich atmet' einen linden Duft
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Dvorák’s 10 settings of Czech translations of the Psalms finds her impassioned in (to use the English translations) the lyrics “Clouds and darkness are round about him”; calm and serene in “You are my hiding place and my shield”; simple and unaffected in “Hear my cry, O God”; pious and penitent in “Turn you unto me and have mercy upon me”; and joyous, albeit measured, in the final “Sing unto the Lord a new song.” She communicates these feelings, not with a surfeit of word painting or breathtaking changes of tonal color, but rather by shifts in volume and intensity. Pruning her interpretations of ego baggage, she makes the sentiments believable.

Such an achievement would not be possible were her support not as exquisite as Rattle and the Berliners’. The conducting is eloquent, inspiring strings and woodwinds to sing with remarkably poetic fluidity. The Philharmonic’s ravishing liquidity balances Kožená’s dryness in the lower range, making for a satisfying whole.

Who Is the “Authentic” Ravel Stylist?

It is remarkable to follow up Kožená’s and Berlin’s performance of Shéhérazade with a revisit to the recent studio effort from Renée Fleming, Alan Gilbert, and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. In the first and longest song, “Asie” (Asia), Kožená is a model of (French?) level-headed restraint as she sings of colorful journeys around the world and ambiguous sexual attractions.

The Philharmonic’s ravishing liquidity balances Kožená’s dryness in the lower range, making for a satisfying whole.

She allows the text to speak for itself, while Fleming leaves no word untouched by her sexual and imaginative passion. Fleming sounds as if her first stop in Asia included some healthy tokes of hashish. Authentic or not, it makes me want to climb aboard her magic carpet and soar with her.

The orchestras, however, tell a very different tale than the singers. The Berliners mist “Asie” and the other songs with an immaculately finished bouquet of the same intoxicating perfume with which Fleming douses her text. The French orchestra, paradoxically, sounds thick and monodimensional, especially when set against the gorgeous sonorities of the Berlin Philharmonic at the start of the final song, “L’indifférent” (The indifferent one). Perhaps Fleming and Rattle together might have been too much of a good thing. As it is, in Kožená’s Shéhérazade, it is the orchestra that makes clear the direction in which she is heading.

Kožená is a model of (French?) level-headed restraint as she sings of colorful journeys around the world.

That her restraint in Ravel is a stylistic choice becomes clear when word painting comes to the fore in Mahler’s five gorgeous Rückert songs. Nonetheless, Kožená possesses neither the daringly soft and breathtakingly beautiful highs of Janet Baker nor her predecessor’s ability to radically alter vocal color for emotional effect. To cite just one of the songs, Kožená’s “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft” (I breathed a gentle fragrance) lacks the perfumed caress that makes Baker’s performance so heart-stopping. Then again, Kožená does have her husband’s magnificent band to venture where she does not go.