Magdalena Kožená and Mitsuko Uchida have been giving song recitals together for over a decade now, though their busy solo careers have inevitably meant that their opportunities to do so have been limited. Their latest Wigmore Hall appearance was a beautifully planned programme of French mélodies, with three of Debussy’s song cycles followed by Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi.
Though officially categorised as a mezzo-soprano rather than a soprano, Kožená’s voice seems really to fall somewhere in between, with few of the darker, lower-register colours that one associates with mezzos, but an easy, free ranging, if occasionally slightly hard-edged upper register. But it’s a voice that wrapped itself beautifully around Debussy’s phrases, beginning with the Chansons de Bilitis then working backwards chronologically through the five Poèmes de Baudelaire and the Ariettes Oubliées.
The French texts weren’t always as distinct as they might have been, and the programme was sometimes needed to discover exactly what was in the poems – by Pierre Louÿs, and Verlaine as well as Baudelaire. The gentle eroticism of the Bilitis songs, contained rather than suppressed, and anticipating the world of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, was beautifully conveyed and made a nice contrast with the distilled Wagnerian echoes of the Baudelaire settings. The Ariettes Oubliées, which Debussy revised after the premiere of Pelléas and dedicated to the Scottish-American soprano Mary Garden who sang Mélisande in the premiere, were a reminder that Kožená has sung that role with distinction.
Uchida’s contribution to these songs, though, was surprisingly impersonal. She never really extracted the keyboard colours from the accompaniments one might have expected, as if reluctant to draw attention away from her partner’s singing, but she did come into her own a little more in Messiaen’s more expansive keyboard writing. Kožená sang the five songs to the composer’s own texts that make up the second book of the cycle, which Messiaen dedicated to his first wife, the violinist and composer Claire Delbos, catching their moments of incantatory power and wordless ecstasy perfectly, even if their sometimes queasy mix of religion and sensuality isn’t to all tastes.
