Word: sopranos
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Little more than a decade ago, she was teaching general music in the Cincinnati public school system to unruly fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Today her audiences range across the world's music capitals right up to the Vatican. Kathleen Battle is the best lyric coloratura soprano in the world. Engaged regularly by the finest orchestras in the U.S. and Europe, and with a thriving recital career under way, she is so good that opera producers now call for a Kathy Battle voice when casting the roles that are her specialty...
Thirty years ago, it would have been big news that Battle is black. Today it is hardly worth mentioning, since talented black women singers are readily accepted at opera's highest levels. The soprano rarely discusses race. Says she: "I don't think I have an ax to grind on that issue...
...break came in 1972, when she took time from teaching to audition for the late Thomas Schippers, then conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony; he was looking for a soprano to sing Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Battle got the job and her career snowballed. In 1976 she made her New York City Opera debut as Susanna. The following year, under Levine's aegis, she also bowed at the Met, in the small part of the Shepherd in Wagner's Tannhauser. By 1980 she was effortlessly hitting the high E's as Blonde...
...ATTEMPT to portray Cline in the most realistic manner possible, Lange has totally changed not only her physical appearance (lucky for her that she's a natural blonde), but her voice as well, dropping it as much as two full octaves in order that her soprano speaking voice match up with Cline's whiskey-throated contralto. Unfortunately for Lange, realism in this context is more often than not equivalent to boredom--six scenes of Cline trying to pull together the threads of her life after either an out-and-out dogfight with second husband Charlie Dick (Ed Harris...
Barbara Winchester, soprano, and Ann Sears, piano: Warburg Hall, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard...