Kate Royal: Kate Royal

Copy at Case Memorial Library
Allan Kozinn wrote in the New York Times: "The British soprano Kate Royal … has made an endearing recital disc for EMI Classics, devoted to repertory that skirts the borders of the mainstream. On Sunday afternoon Ms. Royal devoted much of her program at the Frick Collection — her first recital there — to showing how ravishing these works can sound. Ms. Royal produces an attractive, fully focused sound, but her most compelling quality as an interpreter is an ability to offset the polished surface of a trained voice with the passion and the sense of collective memory, however illusory, that folk singers bring to their art. Works like Rodrigo’s 'Cuatros Madrigales Amatorios' and Granados’s 'Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor' demand that balance. Ms. Royal supplied it with a winning naturalness. … She applied a similar interpretive flexibility to more familiar music as well, including … a handful of songs from Canteloube’s 'Chants D’Auvergne.' The French works, like the Spanish songs that opened the recital, let Ms. Royal show off her lower and middle range, where her voice is at its richest" (4/1/08).