The new CD from husband and wife team Magdalena Kožená and Sir Simon Rattle consists of four sets of folk songs arranged for mezzo-soprano and orchestra; all of them pretty well known.  There are the Five Hungarian Folk Songs of Bartok, Berio’s Folk Songs (all eleven of them), Ravel’s Cinq mélodies populaires grecques and Montsalvatge’s Cinco canciones negras.

They all get really good performances.  There some extremely fine and idiomatic singing from Kožená with excellent diction in seven different languages from Occitan to Armenian and a real sense of what each cycle is about.  For example, she really catches the Latin American rhythms and feeling in the  Montsalvatge.  But what’s really even more impressive is that she is so perfectly at one with the orchestra.  The rapport is more like what one expects with a really good collaborative pianist.  And the Czech Philharmonic is a really good orchestra as witness their playing of the very complex Berio settings.  It’s an extremely satisfying album on all counts.

It’s well recorded too.  The recordings were made in Dvořàk Hall at the Rudolphinium in Prague at various times between 2020 and 2023 and they are spacious, detailed and well balanced.  There is a booklet with full texts and translations plus other information.  Available formats are physical CD, MP3 and CD quality and 96kHz/24bit FLAC.  I listened to CD quality digital.

Catalogue number: Pentatone PTC 518707