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Sunday, 29 November 2015

As Royal as They Come

Good song recitals gave become rarities in Edinburgh outside of the Festival, but Kate Royal’s New Town Concert at the Queen’s Hall tomorrow looks like being something special.

As Glyndebourne’s lissom Feldmarschallin in Der Rosenkavalier last year, she became one of the stars of British opera and the programme of songs with which she has been making a short tour looks wonderfully enticing. It is a themed programme, planned to a nicety - the sort of thing that shows the most scrupulous preparation on the part of the performer.

Aloneness - rather than loneliness - forms its subject, starting with Schumann songs, and passing through Clara Schumann, Mahler, and Samuel Barber before returning to Schumann his long, greatly moving Song of the Hermit as a stand-alone finale.

A mixture of familiar and less familiar items, with Roger Vignoles as pianist, it has been artfully constructed, with Mahler’s I Am Lost to the World as its central highpoint. Since Kate Royal, who has been heard in Edinburgh before, has become a soprano of the utmost poise and delicacy of utterance, seize your opportunity to hear her. Her programme is one to stick in the memory.
30 November 15

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