Not every day does one get to speak with a Dame as well as with a Lady, but when I sit down for a Zoom conversation with Dame Mitsuko Uchida and Magdalena Kožená (aka Lady Rattle), any sense of standing on ceremony goes quickly out of the window; and so does any sense of a formal interview. Here are two clearly great friends, and – in the very best sense – the conversation seems as though it’s taking place mainly between them; I throw in questions occasionally and try to steer us on course, but I largely sit back and enjoy being a passenger as they chat away merrily, freely and openly.

The occasion for the discussion is Pentatone’s release this month of an album of song-cycles by Debussy (the Chansons de Bilitis, Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire and Ariettes oubliées) and five numbers from Messiaen’s remarkable Poèmes pour Mi. This is an especially tantalising prospect: two major stars coming together on disc for the first time. So I start off by taking them both back to the first time they met – and to the first time they were aware of one another.

Not for the last time in the conversation, it’s a question that they essentially answer together, Uchida inviting her colleague to tell the story: ‘You say first,’ she says, ‘because you came to see me in a concert in New York.’ The mezzo responds, ‘Yes – but, of course, I’d been listening to you well before that. I studied piano and my original idea had been to become a pianist, so I knew you much earlier than you think: you were one of the pianists I adored and listened to. But I think you have a much better memory of the story of our first meeting in London,’ she adds, handing the initiative back, ‘so maybe you say that.’

Uchida and Kožená recorded the Pentatone album of French song at Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk, in April 2024 (photography: Matt Jolly)

At that first meeting, chez Uchida a couple of decades ago, the first piece they looked at together, they both agree, was the Chansons de Bilitis – ‘which I’ve always loved’, the pianist says. ‘It’s such stra-a-ange piece,’ she adds, dramatically elongating the ‘a’ for emphasis. And her first impressions of Kožená as a singer? ‘I thought not only how very musically astute you were, but that you were one of the most accurate singers I had ever worked with in terms of pitch; and I could hear just how much you were listening to the piano line. You’re the one singer who could tell me that a note I was playing was a misprint!’ Kožená laughs in response, with a hint of the slight self-deprecation that occasionally colours her contributions.

That meeting, it transpires, was not the only important development in the mezzo’s life at that time. Uchida takes up the story again. ‘And then we were eating dinner, and I opened a nice red wine – but you didn’t want to drink it, and I thought that maybe my wine wasn’t good. You were reluctant to say at first, but then you told me you were pregnant; and you said, “It will come out sooner or later. It’s Simon.” So that’s what our first rehearsal was like!’

The new album, then, takes them all the way back to that very first meeting. ‘Yes,’ Kožená replies, ‘even though we’ve done different programmes in the meantime. It took us so long to get back to this purely French thing.’ Of course, the album represents not just a return to the Chansons de Bilitis (settings of pseudo-ancient erotic poems by Pierre Louÿis) but sees them also tackle the other Debussy settings already mentioned (of early Verlaine in Ariettes oubliées; and of Baudelaire). ‘Ariettes oubliées are absolutely what people think Debussy is,’ Uchida says. She admits that she long struggled with the Baudelaire songs. ‘I could never understand them, and thought, “Maybe I can crack them this time.” But I didn’t know how horrendously unplayable the piece was—’ ‘and unsingable!’ Kožená interjects, then Uchida continues, ‘and it is one of the worst compositions by Debussy in the practical sense. I was gratified when Magdalena told me that Simon, who can sightread anything, said it was unplayable!’ She goes on to explain why: ‘It’s not a finished score. It’s like a repetiteur’s score: he wrote all the possibilities, whether they are playable or not. So it needed so much sorting. And yet we dug in, and, as it turns out, I think it is one of the most interesting pieces by Debussy.’ She hands back to her colleague: ‘What do you think?’

‘Yes, I think so too,’ Kožená agrees. ‘There’s a lot of criticism of him being too Wagnerian in the Baudelaire cycle and going backwards a little bit in his musical language. But I think that’s a mistake; people don’t take the time to understand it. These songs also have to be sung a little bit differently. For Debussy – in the Bilitis songs and others I’ve sung before – I’m usually searching for subtle, very soft, warm colours, but in the Baudelaire that didn’t really work out. I had to really sing more …’ She pauses, to choose her words. ‘This is more like opera. I have to use my chest voice, which I usually don’t use in Debussy.’

It was clearly a special experience, too, for her to work on them with Uchida. ‘Of course, I’d done this piece with other pianists before, but it was amazing to discover how weightless the first phrase could be. When Mitsuko plays, it just starts; it’s like it’s somewhere already in the universe and she just lifts it out. She thinks about every note, about every harmony. You can spend hours understanding some kind of note in the chord – it’s just such an incredibly detailed work. And it’s so inspiring to have the opportunity to make music with her, to discover things together and take time to grow with the piece. With this recording, we didn’t rush it. We did it a few times and we took our time to come back to it and discover new things. These days that’s a huge luxury, and it really pays off.’

The pair had performed the same programme in concert at Wigmore Hall in London, but the hall’s schedule meant that a recording there was not possible. ‘That was the best thing that could have happened,’ Uchida admits. ‘I said, “Let’s postpone,” and we ended up finding Britten’s wonderful Snape Maltings. That’s where we recorded it.’

When I ask more generally about Debussy, both artists reveal that the composer has always been especially close to them. For the teenaged Uchida, freshly arrived from Japan for her studies in Vienna in the 1960s, Debussy was one composer she felt she could play well – and let’s not forget her 1989 recording of the Études, reconsidered (and confirmed) as a classic in these pages in 2016 (1/16). ‘I’ve been playing a lot of Debussy for somebody who is basically a German-speaker and Germanic person and whose musical education was purely in Vienna. When I started playing music seriously at age 12, I couldn’t play Mozart. And even in Schubert, which I loved so much, I sounded awful. Beethoven: impossible! Brahms: a no-go area! And yet, I thought I sounded quite OK in Debussy, and in later Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School – but Debussy, I loved everything!’

Kožená’s affinity also shone through early, despite what she describes as a similarly ‘Germanic’ focus in her conservatory studies in Brno. ‘We hardly ever studied French song at the conservatory,’ she says, ‘because nobody spoke the language. But somehow, I bought the score of every possible Debussy song and played them on the piano for myself. I always felt that if I’d had a previous life, it must have been somewhere in France. I had an immediate love for the harmonies and for this very visual universe of French song. I also played the Préludes on the piano!’

Talk of the universe of French song brings us on to the Messiaen that completes the album: a work that might inhabit the same universe, but is surely also, I suggest, worlds away. For Uchida, this certainly seemed the case after hearing some of Messiaen’s own recordings at the piano. ‘I thought that if he really did it like this, I had totally misunderstood this music. He makes a relentlessly “flat” sound like an organ – BAAAA! – all the time, on the piano as well. So I thought: “What the heck am I going to do?” But I stuck to my guns and went with what I can instinctively do – and that’s it. But ultimately, I think of what Magdalena does in the songs – which is to get to the drama, the dramatic event.’

Kožená takes over: ‘Yeah, exactly. And this is really meant to be for a dramatic soprano anyway, this piece, so if we’re talking about performing operatically, then that’s certainly the case here! But for me it’s completely fascinating, because it’s so square, in a way, as if it’s composed of blocks of stone or something. And just to make this monument out of it – it’s very exciting!’ Uchida jumps in in agreement: ‘I find this music very, very exciting. There are several Messiaen pieces I’ve always loved, but the Poèmes pour Mi, he wrote them for ‘Mi’ – ‘Mi’! That was his first wife, and he must have loved her so much. So it has to be more about direct emotional expression than some other Messiaen.’ Kožená takes up the thread again: ‘Exactly. It’s all about kind of a love for God, but for me there’s so much that’s erotic – but it’s all hidden inside this religious concept, which is something unusual.’

This heady cocktail of eroticism and religion: is there anything else like it? Uchida’s response is fascinating. ‘There’s one composer. He’s very, very different; they have nothing to do with each other in terms of the way they compose, but emotionally … and that is Bruckner. I’m completely not Christian, but I’m agnostic – I don’t deny the word “God”. And music is mysterious, and life is mysterious.’ She recalls hearing, as a student, a performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony given by the Vienna Philharmonic and Carl Schuricht. ‘The conductor was an old man – he had to be carried out – but did a light-footed Bruckner Four. I’d never consciously heard until then how like a strangled duck the Viennese oboe was – and how beautiful it was! It was such a beautiful experience, and I completely fell for Bruckner at that point.’

That recollection leads to further reminiscences of the pianist’s youth in what was Vienna’s post-war heyday, coinciding with Herbert von Karajan’s reign at the Staatsoper. A list of singers she heard there is met with appreciative sounds from Kožená – a mixture of wonder and mild jealousy, one suspects. Mirella Freni (‘my first and second Mimì in La bohème – she opened her mouth and I started to cry’), Leontyne Price (‘my first Viennese Aida’) and Fritz Wunderlich all get a mention. ‘I was rather more interested in opera than I was in pianists,’ Uchida explains. ‘Pianists would move me, but very, very rarely.’ It’s an early education she clearly sees as fundamental. ‘If you want to know Beethoven, you have to know Fidelio, you have to know the nine symphonies and the string quartets. Somehow, trying to play Mozart without knowing his operas is impossible.’ Kožená adds, ‘Not every pianist would think so.’ Uchida’s response: ‘But it’s so true.’ And the mezzo’s retort: ‘But that’s what makes you you!’ They both laugh.

This talk of other artists prompts me to ask what each of them seeks in a musical collaborator. Kožená answers first. ‘It’s a privilege to be able to look for somebody you know will be on the same page musically, but also, more and more and the older I get, it’s about human beings. There are amazing artists, but you wouldn’t want to spend …’ She pauses, to find the right phrase. ‘I wouldn’t want to have a glass of wine with them, let’s say!’ When it comes to pianists, she’s apparently been reproached for working with too many. ‘Some people just stick to one accompanist, and they want to be “faithful”, which is also a wonderful thing. I just think that to have the opportunity to work with somebody like Mitsuko … it just makes my singing much better, because I get so many new ideas and inspirations.’

When Uchida addresses the question, she begins with a revelation of a big-name singer who wanted to work with her. ‘It was Jessye Norman. She came to me when I was playing the complete Mozart sonatas in New York in around 1990 and said something like’ – she effects a rich, mezzo-tinged voice – ‘“Darling! Would you like to do Winterreise with me?”’ It’s a tantalising might-have-been, but it seems that the first meeting took too long to organise, and the idea fizzled out. ‘That was an interesting one that didn’t work out,’ Uchida says, ‘but otherwise, basically, I worked with Ian Bostridge and Mark Padmore. In Mark’s case, I went to him after a wonderful Schöne Müllerin at Wigmore Hall and said, “I really want to work with you. Would you like to come to my place to run through some music?” He liked the idea of rehearsing first and just finding out how we got on.’

We return to the current collaboration, and I ask what might be next for Uchida and Kožená. There’s clearly nothing concrete on the horizon. ‘Magdalena, you have to come up with some pieces,’ Uchida says. ‘The Baudelaire songs in particular were something so strong and absolute, so we have to find something equally peculiar and yet also strong.’ Kožená tells me, ‘I sing everything, basically; but Mitsuko is more particular about what she likes. It will have to be a very serious discussion … with a bottle of wine, I’m sure.’ Uchida laughs: ‘That’s a good idea!’

Kožená and Uchida’s Debussy and Messiaen album is reviewed next issue