Music
The diva at 60
by Ian Dando
The haughty Dame appraised our country’s opera activity as “an army of small parishes” in a recent Sunday Times piece. For some years she has been patron of one of these “parishes”, namely Canterbury Opera. On ticket prices of $120 to $150, CO jam-packed the house during a recent Christchurch recital. Regular concertgoers were conspicuously absent, but not the lion-hunters. Their cursed digital cameras flared out those blinding blue and green lights throughout the concert.
Now 60, Te Kanawa is prickly with anyone suggesting that she be put out to fodder. Fair enough. At that age you don’t think about retirement if you have the astuteness to build a programme around your strengths.
Pick items that are sedate rather than fleet-footed prestos and floated pieces at mezza voce rather than full-throttle. With that you can build perfectly safe programmes for age 60. Combine a touch of class in the content such as the first half of Handel, Mozart and Richard Strauss. It added up to a quality recital that earned my deepest respect.
Her finest single item was her opening one – Handel’s lengthy and taxing “Piangero la sorte”. When you hear intricate artistry at this level, you become aware that you are in the presence of a true diva. Same with the intimate and quietly floated four Strauss lieder. This was her most consistently beautiful bracket, especially her refined poise in the love song “Morgen”.
Standards only wavered slightly when a few items were outside her comfort zone, such as untidy detail in the fast Mozart “An Chloe”, loss of focus in Handel’s decorative “Bel Piacere” and the volatile moments in Catalina’s aria from La Wally that exposed wobbly vibrato and some tonal coarseness in climaxes.
I came close to turning down this recital because of the most appalling reviewer’s tickets I’ve ever had. They were next to the choir stalls. Placed slightly behind the singer, all you got was the reverberant wake rather than the frontal voice from the ship’s deck. It also distorted balance, making it difficult to appraise what seemed to be decent accompaniment from Brian Castles-Onion. All up, though, Te Kanawa gave her little parish a proud moment in its history.
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa with pianist Brian Castles-Onion, Christchurch Town Hall.
