Kathleen Battle
Born: 13th August 1948, Portsmouth, Ohio
Nationality: American
The American lyric-coloratura soprano Kathleen Battle was born in Ohio in 1948 and began her career as an elementary school teacher in Cincinnati, taking singing lessons privately and making her professional debut in 1972 in Spoleto, when she sang the soprano solo in Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem under Thomas Schippers. Schippers subsequently introduced her to James Levine, leading to a long-standing artistic partnership between the two: their recordings together include an album of spirituals with Jessye Norman, a Grammy-winning recital from the Salzburg Festival in 1984, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (also from Salzburg), a disc of Schubert Lieder, the Brahms Requiem and Haydn’s Creation.