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American conductor Thomas Schippers was instrumental in launching Kathleen Battle's career. In a May 2008 interview, she recounts their meeting:

I received a phone call from a girlfriend who sang in the church choir with me. She was Thomas Schippers' secretary and told me that he was holding auditions for local singers. I was about to leave my apartment and go back home.

At the audition Schippers told my friend, Barbara, that he would like to hear me sing the Ein Deutsches Requiem by Brahms, but he wasn't sure that I knew it. Barbara said that I had sung the Requiem recently in church and would be able to do it. When I started, Schippers got up, took the place of the pianist and played for me. At the end, he asked me, ‘Wanna go to Italy?’ It was very coincidental and by chance. It was God.

(Read the entire article here. For the original article in Portuguese, click here.)

As part of the events surrounding the historic first visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the US and on the occassion of his 81st birthday, Kathleen Battle is selected to perform "The Lord's Prayer" during the arrival ceremony held April 16, 2008.

Kathleen Battle shares a fond memory she has of one of her most beloved and esteemed colleagues, the late Tenor Luciano Pavarotti in a March 2008 interview with Larry Fuchsberg of the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

For the first meal in my apartment, he brought over the pots -- I didn't have any yet -- and made pasta.

In the same interview, she speaks of a project for the coming years:

There's one project that's been in me since the womb. It involves the music of my own culture: a solo spirituals project with small musical forces -- just a single instrument here and there. In the current climate, it would have to be a multimedia project with a video component.

In October 2007, at a fundraiser for the Keep a Child Alive Charity, Kathleen Battle and Alicia Keys performed the song Miss Sarajevo written by U2's Bono. Of the performance, Fox News columnist Roger Friedman wrote:

And what they heard may go down in contemporary music history as the night Keys sang a Bono song — Ms. Sarajevo — with opera star Kathleen Battle in English and Italian… nothing could prepare the audience for this moment...The result was so disarming and captivating that one day it will have to be released in some form. Keys’ voice is husky but often finds gorgeous notes. Battle’s voice last night, as always, was crystal perfection. It could not have been a better idea.

(Read the entire review here. Be sure to read Kathleen Battle's account of this special collaboration by going to her official website and clicking on the "KB Recollections" link.)

Jacqueline Hairston, a cousin of the late composer and conductor Jester Hairston, is a pianist, composer, and vocal coach who began arranging spirituals for Kathleen Battle in 1993. She recounts her first meeting Kathleen Battle here