The Wigmore Hall, with its laboriously marbled and gilded period interior, doesn’t exactly scream “rebellion”. Yet for the second time in as many months its conservative classical crowd saw recital conventions discarded like the too-tight bow tie that they are. Players strolled on with relaxed ease, discovered a jam session in progress and decided to join in the fun. The guitars may have been of the Baroque variety, the drum kit replaced with tambour and tambourine, and the bass-line provided by a violone, but last night mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená fronted quite the coolest gig in town.
Framed by the eight-strong forces of Pierre Pitzl’s ensemble Private Musicke, Kožená delivered a concert account of last year’s Lettere Amorose disk – Spanish and Italian madrigals from the likes of Monteverdi, Caccini, Merula and Kapsberger. It’s a programme that took the Edinburgh Festival crowds by surprise last summer, but which only now makes it down to London.
While the disk itself is a joy, the communicative and improvisatory elements of this particular repertoire can only really flourish in the live exchange of the concert hall – music feeding off collegial dialogue, atmosphere and audience reaction. With no music or stand to formalise proceedings, Kožená paced and shifted among the group, at times confronting her audience from the very edge of the stage (knees bent in preparation for some serious emoting) and at other moments insinuating herself among the instruments, just a texture among many.
Hers is one of the most natural voices around – an even, unforced tone that speaks paradoxically of the most conscious artistry. Daring increasingly to place expression above beauty however, there were many moments last night where she let the smooth veil of technical facility slip, and revealed some sharper vocal colours. Raspy, deliberately distorted vowels gave bite to the Spanish numbers (aided by the rhythmic keen and clatter of David Mayoral’s percussion), with pitch abandoned altogether in a second encore – a sort of Renaissance sprechgesang.
In a programme treading such similar ground to Iestyn Davies’s recent Wigmore recital some overlap was inevitable, and came interestingly in the form of Merula’s “Canzonetta spirituale sopra alla nanna”. A work more Gothic cradle song than conventional lullaby, the chromatic harmonies (that rock not with motherly care but with the insistent fretting of a madman) took on a more overtly Moorish colour with accompaniment from guitars and colascione than Richard Egarr’s lone harpsichord could muster. Where Kožená did fall short however was in her more explicit delivery, conveying the music’s unrelenting rawness, but not that eerie stillness that Davies’s controlled pianissimo achieved so brutally.
Although there were death throes and passion gasps aplenty in this glorious repertoire, the greatest impact of the evening was made by the instrumentalists of Private Musicke (pictured above). I don’t think I’ve ever taken serious note of an early-music percussionist: some tambourine-flourishing and a few dance rhythms are generally about the sum of it – music-making barely related to the delicate series of caresses and gestures with which Mayoral coaxed his array of instruments to give up their secrets. When you can be astonished by a tambourine there is really nothing else to do but marvel and surrender to extraordinary musical skill. The purely instrumental Ciacconas, where group improvisations danced around a simple chord sequence, could have convinced an arena crowd, led most often by Hugh Sandilands’s impossibly fluent guitar playing.
There was a swagger and an ease about the evening that spoke of serious musicianship, while the energy spoke solely of enjoyment. To watch an ensemble take so much pleasure in each other’s skill is the very best (and most voyeuristic) kind of concert-going experience: intimacy at once personal and public. The ensemble may be called Private Musicke but theirs is a musical relationship far too sexy to keep to themselves.
- See what's on at the Wigmore Hall this season
- Find Magdalena Kožená on Amazon
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