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CONCERT REVIEW Mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena, Les Violons du Roy and conductor Bernard Labadie. Sunday at Spivey Hall.
More endearingly, more enticingly than any young singer in the opera world, Magdalena Kozena plays to her formidable strengths onstage. While she was singing arias from the French baroque Sunday afternoon at Spivey Hall, it felt like the best concert we'd hear all year.
The rising Czech mezzo-soprano, making her local debut, is the latest coup for little Spivey Hall, the jewel-box venue in Morrow, which continues its amazing run of the past few months, presenting concerts of imperishable beauty and substance that seem to draw as many high-profile listeners from around the world as Atlantans.
Last week, for a Polish baritone, the place was crawling with New York agents; Sunday the audience was all atwitter at the quiet presence of classical music's senior maestro.
Kozena (pronounced ko-CHAY-na) shared the bill with Les Violons du Roy, a 27-member chamber ensemble from Quebec City that revives the name of the French kings' court orchestra. Founded 21 years ago by conductor Bernard Labadie --- a regular guest with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra --- the musicians use modern instruments (metal violin strings, silver flutes) but play with an early-music attitude of clipped, crisp, elegant phrasing. (The group employed two local ringers for the afternoon: ASO horn players Brice Andrus and Susan Welty.)
Labadie and the band opened with the orchestral suite from Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera "Dardanus," profoundly clever and original music in a full range of moods. With refined insights into the composer, Labadie played humor against pathos and, counterintuitively, elevated giddy spectacle to the formality of Greek tragedy. In the suite, as in Jean-Fery Rebel's colorful and picturesque "Les Elemens" --- 10 brief movements beginning with primordial, dissonant "Chaos" --- the music making was taut, energized and thoroughly engrossing.
Interspersed within the "Dardanus" suite, Kozena appeared and sang French arias by Gluck. In "Ah! Malgre moi" ("Ah, Despite myself," from the opera "Armide") she'd slip into a phrase, then open her sound with a gently widening vibrato and darkening vocal color, making even simple declarations ring with personality and emotion. Ravishing.
At 32, Kozena's voice is still growing, still finding its fullest amplitude and power. A generation younger than Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, she has some of the beloved American mezzo's emotional honesty, dignified bearing and meltingly lovely timbre. Not a moment seems ill-considered.
For all the heroic splendor of the Gluck arias, Kozena was best suited to sublime arias by Rameau, reaching deepest for "Tristes apprets" ("Mournful Endings" from "Castor et Pollux"), a solemn aside, classically proportioned, where the young girl prefers death to lost love. Like everyone in the audience, I hung on her every softly cushioned syllable.
Sir Simon Rattle, father of Kozena's toddler son and music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, sat in the fourth row, rapt through the concert. In the serene silence that followed the tapered landing of "Tristes apprets," he was heard to say, "I'd trade all of Gluck for that one aria." Indeed, Kozena singing Rameau's lament was almost unbearably pleasurable.
Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
