The latest recording from Magdalena Kožená and Simon Rattle was largely made last season, when the wife-and-husband team were resident artists at the Czech Philharmonic. Kožená is on gleaming form in music that largely suits her voice well, and the orchestra plays fabulously for Rattle.
Indeed, in Bartók’s Five Hungarian Folksongs it’s the orchestra that’s in the spotlight – there’s so much going on that these would almost work without the voice. Berio’s 11 Folk Songs are another collection in which one senses a composer enjoying himself – this time starting in the US and ending in Azerbaijan, taking in on the way a throaty and fearsome-sounding Sicilian plea for those in peril on the sea, dispatched by Kožená with relish. Here the full orchestra sketches in the glint of light on dangerous waves; elsewhere Berio often pares things right down, for example in the penultimate song, where the lower strings catch the way the spinning wheel speeds and slows.
In these, and in Ravel’s atmospheric but straightforward Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques, Kožená sounds entirely at home. It’s only in the Cinco Canciones Negras by Montsalvatge that she is slightly less convincing, as if the Cuban heat is something she’s singing about rather than feeling.
