Magdalena Kožená has for a long time been an artist of singular originality. Initially specializing in Baroque music, she has gradually expanded her repertoire, always selecting songs or opera roles she believed were a good fit for her voice and sensibility, regardless of what others thought. Without being a great actress, in the conventional sense, Kožená can charm an audience with the intelligence with which she approaches each phrase and her phenomenal intensity.
The Tuesday night recital at Alice Tully Hall included only one traditional work for voice accompanied by piano: Richard Strauss’ Drei Lieder der Ophelia, full of ambiguous passages, conveying the character’s fragility, brought forward by Kožená with an eeriness evoking Debussy’s Mélisande, her trademark role. In the last song, Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloß (They carried him naked at the bier), her repeated “Und kommt er nimmermehr?” – complemented by gloomy piano harmonies suggesting meandering waters and Ophelia’s own death – was heart-wrenching.
The rest of the recital included songs from the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th with the mezzo joined by a shifting group of outstanding musicians, comprised of a string quartet (violinists Giovanni Guzzo and Rahel Maria Rilling, violist Amihai Grosz and cellist Dávid Adorján), flutist Kaspar Zehnder and clarinetist Andrew Marriner, besides Sir Simon Rattle providing an always attentive and subtle accompaniment at the piano. If the choice of songs, many little known, interpreted in French, German, English and Czech, was enticing, the criteria for selecting these and not others were murky. In addition, their order seemed to be a tad at whim. German Lieder inspired by Ophelia were separated by unrelated music by Ravel (and the interval). The Three Songs from William Shakespeare, Stravinsky’s not-very-convincing experiment in serialism, whose aridity Kožená tried her best to compensate, was sandwiched between works by Chausson and Richard Strauss.
The program started with the too-rarely played Chanson perpétuelle by Ernest Chausson, heard in the version with piano and string quartet accompaniment. One can still sense César Franck’s influence in this late work, but nevertheless, it’s an opus of great expressive power. Kožená took great pain to underline the interplay between the sinuous music and the quasi-symbolistic Charles Cros stanzas, drawing on her remarkable ability to isolate and convey the essential. If she occasionally imbued Chausson’s lines – describing an abandoned woman states of mind – with too much pathos, she seemed a little too detached in the other French music of the evening, Ravel’s exotic and delightfully uncharacteristic Chansons madécasses, with their varied sound combinations between voice, flute, cello and piano.