Annals of g-string jurisprudence: an update
Operatic trailblazer Kiri te Kanawa has won yet another victory for every soprano who doesn’t really feel all that much like singing anyway.
The Kiwi canary testified that it was only after agreeing to appear on a concert program with veteran pop icon John Farnham that she discovered that some of his fans expressed their enthusiasm by throwing their panties onstage.
The diva, noting that Farnham collected the frilly underthings “as a sort of trophy,” sniffed that she would find performing in such a milieu “disrespectful.”
Dame Kiri is pictured at right performing a scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni with a fellow paragon of operatic decorum, Bryn Terfel.
Good job on tracking down that pic from the Levine Gala.
Thanks for the first laugh out loud I’ve had in days. Kiwi should stick to golf. She never bothered to learn the Vanessa in her touring dog and pony show with it, so i don’t know why she doesn’t just stay home. what a hypocrite- and with her legendary adventures, I would have thought she’s not in a position to sniff at anybody else.
Geronimo-
I disagree. When I saw her in Vanessa, she knew the part…she had a few audibility problems in the first act, but she knew the part.
Totally off-topic, but, whenever I see Miss te Kanawa sing complicated arias, she always looks like she’s in pain and at times, constipated, wrinkles and all.
Dame Kiri brought her act to my town last fall, accompanied by a charming and still lush-voiced Von Stade. Von Stade brought down the house.
Kiri, however, sang poorly and looked as though she’d MUCH rather have been elsewhere. And she was an almost Battle-esque pain off stage.
Basta, Dame Driri!
Good onya Baritenor- geronimo’s on nasty pills and opera chanteuse has yet to utter a nice word about anything.
Kiri’s had a great career and in her “fache” she can do a great job. I don’t blame her for pulling out of a concert that would have been “a mongrel of a thing” and not a good match – pop singer and diva.
She was never my absolute favorite, but her Countess was KILLER back in the day. Same goes for her Marie-Therese, and especially her Donna Elvira.
Dear Baritenor,
On another thread you identify yourself as a high school student, which makes me congratulate you on your enthusiasm for the artform. However, I’ve worked on 2 productions of Vanessa, so I hope you take it in the right spirit if I point out that I’m perhaps better situated to know if Kiri knew the piece or not when the curtain went up, or if in fact she made about 10 mistakes per page, or if her Erika re-wrote whole parts of the piece to avoid singing (or shrieking, in the case of the productions Kiri was in) high notes. So, nasty pills or not, I’d prefer not to play Little Miss Sunshine on a subject that really pisses me off, ie artists that take huge fees and can’t even be bothered with the basic preparation needed. In the real world, we call that failure to perform…….
Oy. Kiwi should shut up shop and let us remember her in her glory. And glory it was. She already sounds slightly wiped out in the Levine gala on DVD. Such a shame people won’t quit when it’s time. Seriously, I love her Elvira (for Davis, she was young and enthusiastic back then), her Desdemona really works for me after a lyrical fashion, and her Marschallin is probably the best in the 80s-90s era. Besides that, she quite often bores me. As for Vanessa, maybe the tapes they gave her to parrot-learn the role had mistakes in them ?