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Soprano Kate Royal’s Atlanta Debut
RECITAL REVIEW Soprano Kate Royal and pianist Roger Vignoles. Friday at Spivey Hall, www.spiveyhall.org.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
English soprano Kate Royal arrived in Atlanta for her U.S. recital debut Friday evening, the opening salvo in her all-but-inevitable conquest of America.
Inevitable? Almost no one on this side of the pond has heard, of yet heard of, the appealing 28-year-old, who’s already a star in Britain. Her debut CD — “Kate Royal” on EMI — was well received among opera specialists, although it didn’t gain much attention in the wider world.
Yet Royal arrives as an almost-complete package, where her only serious shortcoming happens to be the one thing that American audiences don’t seem to miss from a singer’s arsenal: a crisp, theatrical sense of words and language.
Streams of lustrous sound is what Royal offers in abundance. It’s an oaky, buttery-smooth voice, a glass of the best Chardonnay in the world — a taste that will appeal to many, even as it leaves others craving more complexity and nuance from their pleasures.
Partnered by British pianist Roger Vignoles, she took the stage Friday in a pale grey dress, a sort of slender, floor-length tunic that brought to life a Greek maiden statue from the Acropolis. She’s positioning herself as a “classic” on many levels.
Their opening set of Spanish songs, by Joaquin Rodrigo (his “Four Love Madrigals”) and Enrique Granados (“The Maiden and the Nightingale”), set the mood for the evening: Royal’s phrasing is shapely and always lovely. Her acting helped communicate the message, whether by clenching a fist in fury at her cheating lover or by gently swaying as she remembers the poplars in the breeze in Seville.
Yet almost everything arrived at one slight remove from the audience. Smoothness came at the expense of communicating, with her voice, an involvement with the texts.
In Claude Debussy’s “Five Baudelaire Poems,” Vignoles stretched out the Steinway (Spivey’s piano named Emilie) to symphonic proportions. His playing was ardent, a little cerebral, plump with personality, His approach felt more like a stimulating conversation with the singer than filling out the harmonies in accompaniment.
Royal was at her radiant best, magnificent in fact, in five melodies from Joseph Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne,” in part because these earthy, folk-inspired tunes are sung in a vowel-heavy Romance language with veiled emotional content.
Richard Strauss loved the soprano voice and seemed to have written with Royal’s in mind. The natural strengths of her instrument lie where Strauss asks it to linger, creating a wistful beauty to a song like “Epheu” (“Ivy”). Still, for all the poignant gorgeousness of her singing, something essential was missing.
As an encore, they offered Delibes’ gypsy-fired “Les Filles des Cadix” — wonderful and charismatic, and yet with a sense of the wild held in reserve.
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