While happy to send us their suspect pop music, it seems France has been holding out on us with soprano Magali Léger. Doe-eyed, irrepressibly adorable—imagine Audrey Tautou with high Cs—and blessed with Michelle Obama arms, Léger left us somewhat agog after her New York debut last night in an overdue recital.
Performing with the Ensemble du Monde and its music director, Marlon Daniel, Léger gave the Merkin Concert Hall a preview of April’s Saint-Georges International Festival of Guadeloupe, a four-day event to honor the composer dubbed “the Black Mozart.” Like Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de St. Georges, Léger is a native of the island of Guadeloupe, and perhaps it’s this shared balance between French Caribbean and French Baroque that made her an ideal interpreter for these rarely heard works. We were admittedly taken aback when she came out at the beginning of the concert and sat center stage throughout the overture to Boulogne’s L’amant anonyme. However, we weren’t going to argue with her or her Grecian blue dress (a nod, perhaps, to the classical period’s roots in Greek mythology). Neither, it seemed, was anyone else in the audience.
Presenting two arias from the same opera, Léger was the embodiment of her last name (French for “light”) with a liberating coloratura that skyrocketed to the upper register effortlessly. Hers was a Riviera soprano, mixing the warmth of sun-baked ochres with the coolness of rippling azures to create an irresistible tone. The connection she fostered with the cozy audience allowed her to shine, even when the orchestra seemed unable to curb its enthusiastic dynamics (which hovered near forte for most of the evening).
With just three arias and one encore, however, we found it somewhat criminal to then devote the second half of the concert to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3. The youthful Ensemble du Monde creates an optimistic picture of the future of classical music onstage; however the symphony’s subtle intricacies were not the group’s specialty. Yet for their bombastically fortissimo take on the “Eroica”—this was Norwegian death-metal Beethoven—we were still drawn to it like a scruffy puppy. Sometimes an audacious energy supersedes flawless technique; though another hour of arias from our newest musical crush would have conquered all.
Guadeloupe Attitude 