Dame Kiri Te Kanawa at The Helix
11 April 2003

On Easter Saturday night, 20 April 2003, a capacity audience in The Mahony Hall at The Helix enjoyed a gala recital with the legendary Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Born in New Zealand, Dame Kiri is the daughter of an Irish mother and a Maori father. She shot to fame in New Zealand shortly after leaving school and moved in 1965 to the UK to study at the London Opera Centre. She came to international attention in the roles of Xenia in Boris Godunov and the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro.

The subject of four biographies and countless newspaper and journal articles Dame Kiri has been hailed as 'a Maori girl', as 'New Zealand's Diva', as 'The Proud Chatelaine' and as 'The Elegant Countess'. She has written two books, 'Land of the Long White Cloud: Maori myths, tales and legends' and, with Conrad Wilson, 'Opera for Lovers'.

Dame Kiri's vast repertoire includes the opera classics and popular music. She has recorded songs by Jerome Kern, Ira and George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. She has recorded Christmas songs as well as Italian, French and German opera arias. In 1999 she released an album of Maori songs in which she presented songs of her childhood. She has performed on stage with the world's major orchestral ensembles including the London Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is of course a familiar figure in opera houses around the world, Covent Garden in London, the Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Centre in New York, Paris Opera, Sydney Opera House, the Vienna State, La Scala, Munich and Cologne. She has appeared at gala concerts in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia. She has performed at venues such as the Hollywood Bowl and the arena at Verona and at venues in the Australian outback.

At The Helix on Easter Saturday night Dame Kiri sang a beautiful selection of songs and arias including Debussy's Romance and Faure's Apres un Reve. Said to have the finest voice in the world, she brought the house to its feet with her final encore, O mio babbino cara, Lauretta's exquisitely gentle aria from Puccini's opera Gianni Schicchi, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. Dame Kiri's rendition of this aria, for those of you who missed it on Saturday night, can be heard on the sound track of the Merchant Ivory film 'A Room with a View'.

In the extraordinary acoustic, which Kiri Te Kanawa remarked upon, of our Mahony Hall, the artist's voice was finely resonant, the performance, for me, truly wonderful.

Christina Quinlan