Dame Kiri Te Kanawa File Photo 2002 APA rare and dignified goodbye - Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Warren Jones - Friday at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall
TORONTO (Globe and Mail), October 22, 2007:
Western society is not very good at rituals of farewell nowadays. At airports it's tricky to make a dignified goodbye while frantically yanking off your shoes and emptying your pockets at the security checkpoint. At work, you arrive one morning to learn that a long-standing colleague - whom you hadn't actually seen for years because they worked from home - is no longer with the company. And that's that.
But in Operaland, people can still make a civilized goodbye, through the ritual known as the Farewell Recital Tour. And on Friday night neither love nor money could have gotten you a ticket to Dame Kiri Te Kanawa's sold-out concert at Roy Thomson Hall, which was also the superstar soprano's final performance in Canada. Stage seats added almost three weeks before the concert were snapped up at $125 apiece. Even exasperated scalpers had nothing to offer potential buyers as curtain time drew near.
Dame Kiri who became a household name in 1981 when some 600 million viewers thrilled to her singing at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, could easily have sold out her farewell tour with an evening of musical bonbons. Instead, she presented a rich program that began with a timely call for universal love and religious tolerance: Mozart's rarely performed Masonic cantata, Die ihr des unermesslichen Weltalls (K. 619).
Reflections on youth, mortality and love followed in songs by Richard Strauss, Henri Duparc and others. The second half included some bittersweet comments on a singer's life, including Jake Heggie's setting of a words spoken by Maria Callas in Terrence McNally's play, Masterclass, and Aaron Copland's Why do they shut me out of Heaven? ("Did I sing too loud?," inquires the singer with volume that gives credence to the possibility in this droll setting a poem by Emily Dickinson.)
In many ways, it's hard to believe that Dame Kiri is 63. She looks like a stunning 40-year-old, and has retained a bull's-eye sense of pitch. The sounds that came out of her mouth on Friday night were lovely. But you can't expect a voice - even one as well-trained and well-treated as Dame Kiri's - to remain unchanged into its seventh decade. This is no longer the voice that thrilled hearts - indeed, it is no longer a voice that can fill Roy Thomson Hall.
I found myself envying Vancouverites, who recently got to hear Dame Kiri sing the same program in the intimate Chan Centre for the Performing Arts when a civic strike shut down the larger Orpheum. Dame Kiri made her warmest connection with the audience in the Copland and Heggie, as well as a delightful encore by Richard Rodney Bennett, aptly titled called Goodbye for Now. But this was not an evening of searching interpretations, or performances that touched the heart. It was about careful, skilled vocal accommodation. The richness - the 75 per cent chocolate coating on Dame Kiri's sound - was no longer there; at no point did the singer sweep you up with the force of imagination or passion.
Pianist Warren Jones tiptoed expertly around the singer's voice, with the piano lid opened only a crack. But even so, the voice barely cleared the piano much of the time.
But of course, Friday night wasn't just about singing. It was a chance to thank a beloved singer for a lifetime singing that did touch hearts, and for her dedication to an art that is as demanding as it is glorious.
By Tamara Bernstein
Special to The Globe and Mail
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Backgrounder
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa Photo by John Swannell.
Her Current 'Farewell' Tour Doesn't Mean She's Retiring
Matthew Westphal, of the Orange County Register of Southern California, reported on October 9, 2007:
Kiri Te Kanawa is now in the midst of a recital tour of North America — a series of performances which most presenters are billing as a "farewell tour." This seems to irk her just a bit.
"The thing is people [make] it into a farewell, but you know you can't stop people doing that," she told the Orange County Register of southern California recently. "They want to do it, so [afterwards] they sort of want you over and out and in the box. So, if that pleases them, then that's fine."
As for herself, she said, "I mean, I'm not going to go into a hole and sit there and wait for death. No way."
While the renowned New Zealand soprano, now 63, has ended her career in staged opera (her last production was in Samuel Barber's Vanessa at Los Angeles Opera in 2004), she has by no means given up concerts. She told the Register that, if anything, this tour included concerts in a number of places where she feels she's unlikely to perform again.
The voice certainly seems to be in good shape: Michael Ryszynski, writing for The Los Angeles Times of her October 2 performance at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, praised "her pure tone, with its superbly controlled soft upper register."
