Botti is a rarity….
"...Susan Botti...as both performer and composer is one of the fresher, more imaginative voices on the New York new-music scene..." (James Oestreich, NY Times)
(Duo della Luna’s Mangetsu) Botti’s a wonderful foil for Yoshioka’s violin playing… earthy and immediate with such a wide range of vocalizations… unusual and effective writing, infectiously lively performances (Andrew McGregor, BBC Radio 3)
"Botti is a rarity in the classical world - one of a few musicians who compose and perform their own music. As a singer, she possesses a wide technical and emotional range,…Reminiscent of great purveyors of 20th century vocal music such as Jan de Gaetani and Cathy Berberian, she is direct and powerful yet can recede to eloquence and intimacy. That takes great acting skills, which were in full force here…The score's musical language ranges widely. Close, lush string harmonies, pointillistic textures, drones, and outbursts of grating, percussive dissonance…"
(Michael Huebner, ArtsBHAM)
"…When Botti is hot, she is incandescent. Her soprano sears the score, consumes it, and breathes it back as musical fire. And that’s when she’s singing other composers’ material. When she’s singing her own music, Botti is transformed from re-creator to creator of an intense, immensely emotional music…
Her voice can be as sorrowful as a sob, as soft as a farewell, and as fine as a line drawn with a sharp knife on the soft skin above the heart… emotional display of the rawest and most elemental form. Her art is Dionysian, not Apollonian, and Botti is a bacchante, tearing the emotional flesh from the rigid bones of the score…" (James Leonard, The Ann Arbor Observer)
“Mr. Tan could not have asked for a more involved performance from the players (Red Forecast), and especially from the soprano Susan Botti,
who vanquished the wide-ranging solo part" (Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times)
"…Susan Botti’s breathtakingly lovely voice…
(Tan Dun’s Red Forecast)"
(Mary Miller, The Scotsman, Edinburgh)
"Simply as an act of concentration, the singing (in Tan Dun's Marco Polo) was enormously impressive, especially from...Susan Botti as Water, handling Zerbinetta-ish coloratura with ease and at one point imitating a flexatone with uncanny accuracy." (Rodney Milnes, The London Times)
"Susan Botti...delivered the atmospheric, textless vocal part (She Is Asleepby John Cage) exquisitely. Ms. Botti's composition Jabberwocky...effectively turned Lewis Carroll's satirical poem into a shockingly expressionistic musical narrative..." Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
"The best thing about this generally fine performance (Gubaidulina's Homage à T.S. Eliot) was soprano Susan Botti. The New York singer has
a vocal presence that speaks to the essence of the music, illuminating every note. Her diction is impeccable, with even the quietest syllables and awkward vocal tangles made perfectly clear, and she infuses the music with the nuance Gubaidulina intended." (Douglas McLennan, Seattle Weekly)
"...Botti is a performance artist - if the term is understood to cover a complete control of gesture...Berio's Sequenza III and the Attila József Fragments of Kurtág, virtuoso masterworks...for unaccompanied solo voice, which demands the utmost concentration and variety of sound challenges met by Botti with deceptive ease...fierce intensity and total command of her pure, cleanly produced voice"
(Fred Hauptman, Seattle Weekly)