Magdalena Kozena, Wigmore Hall, London

Magdalena Kozena is climbing everyone's A list. She's set to work with Simon Rattle at Glyndebourne, Salzburg and Berlin. Deutsche Grammophon has signed her to an exclusive contract. The marketing men are poised. She sounds as good as she looks. Striking voice, bony catwalk countenance. She is blonde and fragile. The voice is dark and robust. I hear they're dubbing her "the operatic Bond girl". Well, that's it, then. What more could anyone want?

Actually, a lot. They cheered her at this, her second Wigmore Hall appearance, but one thing was clear before even her first set of songs had ended: her grasp of how sound relates to sense and feeling, and the role that words play in that equation, left much to be desired.

Kozena is Czech, and to her credit she chose a Czech first half: Eben, Rosler, Vorisek, Kricka. A wise move, you might say, since points of comparison were at once redundant. But that wasn't the issue. In Eben's Six Minnelieder, settings embracing four languages, little distinction was made between them. That I can live with. But when every song is virtually identical, when little or no sense of their mood or sentiment is conveyed, then I worry.

Kozena has an awkward demeanour, the smiles almost apologetic, the hands stiff. But it extends to her singing, which fails to charm. The marketing men may exploit her sexual allure but the singing will have none of it. The sound is gorgeous in repose (less so when aroused) but the phrasing is never a come-on. Any singer who fails to seduce us with Henri Duparc should be asking why. She sang "L'Invitation au voyage" with little appreciation of its "sensuous delight". In the words of one of the Eben songs: "But where are the snows of bygone years?" In this singing, I'm afraid. Very chilly. No humour, either. Kozena's voice doesn't smile, she hasn't learned how to tease and intimate with sound alone. And where the subtext is meatier and more sardonic, it weighs heavily on her shoulders.

She was brave (if unwise) to choose Britten's "A Charm of Lullabies" and Shostakovich's Satires (Pictures of the Past): the stuff of nightmares both. Britten's waspish consonants proved pointless in the face of so many askew vowels, and she was way out of her depth in the savage Shostakovich settings. Malcolm Martineau, her marvellous accompanist, flung down the parodic pyrotechnics but Kozena could find only hoots of derision and a funny voice in response. A case, as yet, of a girl doing a woman's work.