Sublime soprano booked for return visit to Auckland

By LINDA HERRICK

Temperamental American soprano Kathleen Battle is returning to New Zealand to give one performance at Auckland Town Hall on November 9, her first visit since an anonymous fan paid $15,000 to bring her here in 1999.

This time, Australian-based International Concert Attractions is promoting the 54-year-old diva's appearance, where she will be accompanied by American pianist Cliff Jackson. Tickets will cost $90-$245.

Battle's name does her justice, with stories about her bad temper and bizarre behaviour almost as renowned as her glorious 2 1/2-octave voice.

She is renowned as too elevated to talk to underlings and one infamous account has her ringing her New York management from a limo in southern California to complain that the car was chilly. Her manager called the limo service in Los Angeles, which phoned the driver.

While singing in Boston, she phoned Boston Symphony management to complain that the Ritz-Carlton room service had put peas in her pasta.

She developed a notorious reputation for lateness and for withering criticism of fellow performers. In one production, she demanded that no other cast members look at her.

But the most infamous incident of her career was in 1994, when New York Met manager Joe Volpe fired her for "unprofessional actions" over her vicious treatment of beloved mezzo-soprano Rosalind Elias during rehearsals for Donizetti's La fille du regiment. Cast and crew burst into applause and handed out "I survived the Battle" T-shirts.

Time magazine reported on the firing: "Battle is renowned for leaving a trail of ill-will in her wake wherever she goes. She is impossible - fussy, erratic and arbitrary."

Since then, she has not appeared with any major opera company in the United States. Five-time Emmy award-winner Battle has concentrated mainly on recordings through the late 1990s, adding jazz and sacred music to her operatic repertoire, to less than favourable reviews. However, reports indicate she is now more congenial to work with, and a rare live appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1999 was sold out, with seven encores - as was her 1999 concert in Auckland, judged by a Herald reviewer as "spine-tingling".

A Guardian report on her performance with the London Philharmonic at the Royal Festival Hall less than two years ago was not so kind, judging her behaviour as "the sort of display of brute diva-force one had assumed had disappeared".

Tickets for Battle's Auckland show go on sale on September 2.