Recording of the Week, Folk Songs from Magdalena Kožená

Back in 2019, Magdalena Kožená gathered a group of friends and family (including her husband Simon Rattle in his recording debut as a pianist) for a delightful Soirée of songs for voice and chamber ensemble, the highlights of which were bucolic numbers by her compatriots Dvořák and Janáček – and today the Czech mezzo serves up an equally vibrant programme of folk-inspired orchestral song-cycles from the twentieth century, with Rattle back on the podium and the Czech Philharmonic on superbly characterful form.

In the booklet-note Kožená recounts how ‘folksongs accompanied her entire childhood’ in Moravia, but this is no programme of ‘songs my mother taught me’: this time around she casts her net far and wide, taking in music by Bartók, Berio, Ravel and Montsalvatge which requires her to tackle not only each composer’s mother-tongue but also Sicilian and Occitan dialects, Armenian and Yoruba along the way.

The way that Kožená leans right into the expressive possibilities offered by each language is evident from the opening set of five folk-songs which Bartók selected and orchestrated from the anthology of twenty such pieces he’d collected and set for voice and piano in 1929, after decades of traversing the Hungarian countryside in search of authentic Magyar melodies. In the first two lachrymose songs (‘In Prison’ and ‘Old Lament’) she relishes the many hard consonants and sibilants to great interpretative effect without ever compromising on line, and in the rollicking final number (a tale of the quick and the disappointed, in which a tardy wedding-guest has to be content with unappetising scraps from the buffet) she has a whale of a time imitating the plentiful percussion with rapid-fire patter and the odd dash of Sprechstimme.One of the great joys of this album is the sense of genuine dialogue between Kožená and the instrumentalists. This is a singer who really listens in detail to what’s going on in the orchestra, and colours her voice accordingly; when we spoke a few years ago about her Duparc recording with Robin Ticciati and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, she observed that ‘when you sing with a flute, you can allow a little more air into your voice to match the timbre of the instrument, and I love to play with things like that… I would never want to be the kind of singer who rolls up and says “Here am I: please accompany me!” ’

Examples of this sort of thing abound in the eleven folk-songs brought to life in the mid-1960s by another musical power-couple, Luciano Berio and his wife Cathy Berberian, and given here in the full orchestral arrangement which the composer made a decade later. Listen to the way Kožená shades her sound to match the flute, oboe and trumpet lines which emerge from the texture in John Jacob Niles’s ‘I wonder as I wander’ (where the players of the Czech Philharmonic really do sound like bona fide folk-musicians), or the delicious plangency of her duet with flute in the ‘song from the Auvergne’ depicting a shepherdess-turned-spinner.

The other chief delight throughout the programme is how well the fresh unaffectedness of Kožená’s light mezzo lends itself to folk-inspired material: diction is always crystal-clear, and she never gilds the lily by pushing for a bigger, more operatic sound than the music requires. When she does unleash an unexpectedly formidable chest-voice to a portray a Sicilian fishwife in ‘A la femminisca’, the effect is as bracing as a dash of salt-water – and she and the players have an absolute blast in the fiery Azerbaijani Love Song which closes the sequence.

Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques are characterised with a lovely blend of tenderness and transparency - but the highlight of the programme is Montsalvatge’s 5 Canciones Negras, composed in 1945 to throw a light on the racially-diverse culture of the Spanish Caribbean. Kožená and the orchestra really cut loose in the habanera-inflected depiction of Havana by night which opens the sequence, and even more so in the final irrepressible hymn to Black joy on a text by Cuban poet and activist Nicolás Guillén – if you’ve ever found Lady Rattle slightly too cool and collected for your taste, this is the track to change your mind.