Photo by Petr Skvrne
Kožená has established herself as a versatile singer of taste, intelligence, passion, and stylishness. All the more reason to believe that her overly adrenalized singing of a group of Purcell songs, with realizations by Britten, was due to a distorted perspective brought on by the cold. Britten’s accompaniments, frenzied and heavy to begin with, certainly brought out the worst in both singer and pianist Karel Košárek: Her straightened tones were piercing, her louder dynamic strident, and he ripped into the overripe chords like a lion at its prey. This might have been the case even if the singer had been in the best of health, but that’s exactly the problem. How can you know for sure? Even the gorgeous, plaintive “Not all my sorrows” sounded in places like 19th-century opera.
Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und leben (A woman’s love and life) suffered for a different reason: Kožená lavished her abundant passion on individual words and phrases but seemed unable to maintain a through-line for the development of the character from breathless, adoring young girl, through mature marital partner, to grieving widow. The singer’s emotional highs and lows were mostly erratic and didn’t help the listener connect with the character’s emotional state. Where she did succeed in perfectly expressing the character’s emotion, as in “Du ring an meinem finger” (Thou ring on my finger) at “Ich will ihm dienen, ihm leben/Ihm angehören ganz” (I want to serve him, live for him/belong to him entirely), and at the very end of “Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben” (I can’t grasp it, nor believe it), she had already spilled so much random passion that these moments passed without leaving their mark.
In the final song, “Nun hast du mich den ersten Schmerz getan” (Now thou has given me, for the first time, pain), the singer offered a generalized expression of grief, rather than a moment-by-moment working-through from the initial shock of the beloved husband’s death, to the realization of the vast emptiness of life for her, and ultimately the retreat into herself where she will live the remainder of her life remembering what was. It is a tiny drama, lasting only a few moments, and it requires the utmost attention to the rapid changes in the character’s outlook. This attention, this living in the moment, was apparently beyond Kožená’s ability. The cold? Or the limits of her artistry?
Ruth Felt reappeared before the second half to announce (to apprehensive murmurings) that, because of the effects of the cold on her lower register (which had already been evident), the singer had chosen not to perform the last set on the program, Berg’s Sieben frühe lieder (Seven early songs). That left a group of songs by Henri Duparc to end the truncated program. Here again, the singer’s fervency, uncontrolled by her usual good taste, drove her into shrillness. And was it the cold that prevented her from conveying all the opulence and sensuousness of that mountain of a song, “Phidylé,” or was it simply too high a mountain for this artist to tackle, even at the best of times?
Kožená had tried, like a trooper, to tough it out. If I could have, as a human being, rushed up onstage with a warming, honey-laced cup of restorative tea, I would have done so. But as a reviewer, my sympathy was mixed with vexation that this fine singer felt obligated to perform a recital — a difficult enough ordeal in perfect health-when she clearly was not feeling well enough to do so.