Album: L’extase – Debussy & Messiaen
Artists: Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano), Mitsuko Uchida (piano)
Label: Pentatone
Released: 2025
Works:
Claude Debussy – Trois Chansons de Bilitis, 5 poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, Ariettes oubliées
Olivier Messiaen – Poèmes pour Mi (Deuxième Livre)
Total playing time: approx. 74′
Available on all streaming platforms
With L’extase, mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená and pianist Mitsuko Uchida offer an intimate journey through the vocal music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen — two composers linked not only by their French identity, but by a deep aesthetic connection. The album brings together some of Debussy’s most evocative songs with the second book of Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi, revealing an arc that spans hedonism, mysticism, and spiritual ecstasy.
Messiaen openly acknowledged Debussy as one of his greatest influences. He often recalled receiving the score of Pelléas et Mélisande as a child — a gift that, in his own words, helped define his vocation. Their music, however different in idiom, shares an interest in the sensual power of sound, the blending of voice and piano timbres, and the poetic elevation of love and longing.
Both performers bring strong credentials to this repertoire. Kožená’s wide-ranging discography spans from Monteverdi to Martinů, and her acclaimed recording of Pelléas et Mélisande with Charles Dutoit had already revealed her natural affinity for Debussy’s language. Uchida, meanwhile, has performed Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques under Simon Rattle and Andris Nelsons, and her interpretation of Debussy’s Études is considered one of the benchmarks of the catalogue.
The album opens with Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis, inspired by the sensual, pseudo-Greek poems of Pierre Louÿs, and continues with the symbolist richness of the Baudelaire and Verlaine settings. It culminates in the deeply personal Poèmes pour Mi (1936), a cycle Messiaen wrote for his wife Claire Delbos. These five songs blend theological imagery and carnal emotion in a language already unmistakably his: rhapsodic, ecstatic, and full of luminous harmonies.
L’extase is not only a meeting of two great interpreters — it is a subtle meditation on continuity and transformation in 20th-century French music.
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