Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle Sing Spirituals

Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle made history when they took to the Carnegie Hall stage on 18 March 1990. In the audience: the veteran African-American opera singer Marian Anderson, one of the great voices of her generation, who in 1939 had been barred from singing in Constitution Hall because the colour of her skin. The twelve-year-old Jessye Norman had absorbed Anderson’s biography, just as she had the music she performed that evening, together with her great colleague and competitor Kathleen Battle: spirituals. Many haboured doubts, but the concert was a triumph – a triumph whose background is here revisited through interviews with those who were there and those who continue to be inspired by it.

Soloists: 

Jessye Norman (Soprano), Kathleen Battle (Soprano)