Simon Rattle’s debut appearance at London’s chamber-music HQ – as pianist, not conductor – was a kind of bring-your-husband-to-work day for mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, who has her own series of concerts there this season. Presumably it was Rattle’s presence that so inflated the ticket prices; but the performance itself took a long while to come anywhere near justifying them.
Six other formidable musicians were onstage: a string quartet drawn mainly from Rattle’s Berlin Philharmonic, flautist Kaspar Zehnder, and Andrew Marriner, who will be Rattle’s principal clarinettist when he takes over the LSO. The first half was intriguingly programmed, mostly songs on a Shakespearian theme. Kožená wove gleaming, elastic threads around the muted strings and piano in Chausson’s Chanson Perpétuelle, but was less comfortable sparring with flute, viola and clarinet in Stravinsky’s three lean Songs from William Shakespeare.
Duetting with Rattle in Strauss’s Ophelia Songs, she was more confident; but still, her topmost notes stubbornly refused to bloom. It was good to hear Ravel’s sultry Madagascan Songs from 1926, the middle one a bold anti-colonial statement. But all these performances had a thrown-together feel, with Kožená reading off a music stand and only fitfully animating the words, Rattle melting into the background, and the others seizing their solos but not seeming part of a fully formed interpretation.
In the second half Brahms’s Two Songs with Viola, for which Kožená and Rattle were joined by Amihai Grosz, at last brought a buzz of energy to the platform. Kožená is reliably at her best in her native, Czech repertoire: Rikadla, Janáček’s succinct, strident nursery-rhyme settings, were vividly done, with Marriner and Rattle cheeky and incisive; and Kožená’s voice glowed in seven Dvorak songs, given in new arrangements involving the whole ensemble. And this was indeed an ensemble concert, not a star recital; of the final encore, Strauss’s Morgen, it’s Daishin Kashimoto’s violin solo that lingers in the memory more than Kožená’s singing or Rattle’s playing.
