ready for her turban
So La Cieca thinks it’s time to declare this officially: Kiri te Kanawa has become a mean old bat. The downbeat diva, most recently in the headlines for her controversial anti-panty policy, has gone and dished Hayley Westenra, who apparently is a New Zealand popera singer. (Well, to be perfectly fair, “apparently” isn’t so accurate a way of putting it. Ms. Westenra’s debut CD currently ranks as “the biggest-selling classical album of the 21st century.” Really, cher public, you should keep La Cieca up to date on stuff like this.)
Anyway, the cranky Kiwi gave an interview to Canvas magazine (yes, again, La Cieca feels like she’s totally in the dark here) where she sniped that 20-year-old Hayley is “…not in my world, she’s never been in it at all.”
Te Kanawa then widened the scope of her outrage, insisting that pop opera performers in general “…are all fake singers, they sing with a microphone. People call them up-and-coming, but they never last. They are the new fakes for the new generation.”
Unfortunately La Cieca was not on hand to eavesdrop on the rest of the interview, but she dearly hopes that Dame Kiri next said something like, “Look at them in the front offices — the masterminds! They took the idols and smashed them — the Fairbanks and the Gilberts, the Valentinos! And who have we got now? Some nobodies!”
Incidentally, Dame Kiri’s next engagement (Tuesday, February 26) is a guest appearance on the New Zealand version of the television show “Dancing with the Stars.”
that is frankly absurd. no ballet company uses urban dancers for traditonal ballet, swan lake, and such.They are doing new ballets, and that is fine. The need to incorporate cabaret in opera has already taken place. How many more voices undersized for an opera house will be glorified and awarded yet. Brava to anyone who tries to protect the great art, the authentic art. stuffy reruns. stay home then.
there are plenty who love opera , it is hardly dying as someone would have you think.
PerPieta if all you can come up with is the silly old lie about opera singers being louder than others opera will soon die.
I used to buy totally into the Art Music myth — that opera was somehow superior. It was seeing the absurdity of people on YouTube and opera fora that made me question it. This garbage about not using microphones was one of the first things that made me wonder. Projection is just a circus trick, it is nothing to do with art or singing ability.
Get real. It is obnoxiously agressive purists who are killing opera. The Holier Than Thou attitude that is so evident from the opera nuts over Te Kanawa’s parroting some rubbish she had tried to memorise is a case in point.
Opera is just another method of expression. It is not superior to popera, pop, or anything else. Face it.
It has always had intelligent detracters too. Dr Jonhnson was one.
Really, it makes a good substute for Mony Python, but art? It is hilariously silly. People don’t bellow and shriek at each other when making love, for example.
But the style of singing that you all rate so highly only came about because the houses and orchestras were getting bigger and the singers had to bellow like wounded beasts.
The hatred and jealousy of the opera nutters on YouTube and the opera fora is that of very odd people. Hating popera or hating someone’s music is one thing; hating them personally is another.
The first clip of Kathy Jenkins I ever saw I thought was the silliest bit of singing I’d ever seen: but I didn’t hate her personally. I hoped she might get the hang of singing real music (as opposed to that opera crap) and soon improve. She has.
The opera people hate the likes of Westenra, Jenkins etc, personally, with malice and viciousness and a real desire to see them come to harm.
The opera freaks have a lot of their self-image invested in their being opera fans, it seems.
The popera’s real sin is that they lay bare the fallacies the Art (lol) Music notion are based on.
PerPieta, several months ago I would have been interested in going to an opera.
After seeing the attitude of opera fans and their hatred, malice and their ridiculous pretentions arrogance and affectations of intellectual superiority, the only way you’d get me within a hundred metres of an opera house would be to fire bomb it.
And what respect I had for Te Kanawa is gone. I can’t be bothered with this pretentious crap.
I once observed that popera singers were singing for a different audience than opera fans and was quite savagely attacted as “ignorant” and “intellectually challenged”.
It is not great art and it has been hijacked by imbeciles.
What bloody authority do you have to tell us what art is?
God Dammit, young lady. Stop being so impertinent!
armerjacquino, That is damnably rude of you, sir. Just because this harridan mountebank Te Kanawa is being a jealous and snooty old cow and indulging in risibly absurd musical snobbery is no call for you to show bad form too.
I beg your pardon I’m sorry. I forgot myself. Of course Opera singers are the only REAL singers and astronomically superior in every way to popera filth, who should all have their extremities removed one by one and their hearts cut out while they are still alive.
I see on YouTube that Jenkins didn’t really win a scholarship to Rada at all, it was all a mistake; and I’ve learnt now that Westenra wants to do opera. She’s keep this well hidden from even her family it seems, but Mr Tenor wouldn’t get such a thing wrong. I suspect that she is the High Priestess of a Wiccan cult that romps skyclad in the woods with demons, and sacrifices Christian babies to the great God Pan after smashing their heads on rocks and drinking the blood out of their skulls.
Of course , on the other hand, opera singers are creative and thinking people. You may think that Dame Kiri is a cretin, on the basis of her continual brainless remarks over the years, but this is not so.
Mick Jagger won a scholarship to the London School of Economics where he met Keith Richards, Buffy St Marie has a PhD, Kris Kristofesson was a professor of English, but they are all just pop singers and don’t have the depth of intellect, the creativity, the artistic integrity or the verbal aptitude of the most feeble-minded of opera singers who are in a different league in every respect.
The pop and popera singers all have squeaky little voices and couldn’t be heard beyond the pits without the silly microphones. This proves they are fake right there!
They are famous for six months, like all pop singers, and then quickly forgotten.
Oh, hell, there was something else…. Bugger, I should have written it down like Dame Kiri did.
Oh yes, they don’t have any formal training!
Opera singers study for 35 years in the conservatory learning to strengthen their sphincter muscles so they can fart so loudly that it can be heard over a 300 piece orchestra.
Once, when on a stage in London, Sir Thomas Allen farted so loudly it was heard in Tel Aviv. Well, they are pretty sure it was. That is why he was knighted.
I’m very bored myself actually. I am confined through injury to remain in front of this machine for a day or two.
Why don’t you entertain us?
But what does La Cieca mean by saying that the Great Dame has become a mean old bat? She has been known as a bitch who thought herself better than anyone else since she started training.
Later she threw a wobbly and said that she’d never sing in New Zealand again until they built a proper opera house with the acoustics designed so her weak squeaky little voice could be heard.
She complained that the Maori elders should do more about bad Maori parents. (It was as though she had read up about pre-colonial Maori law and thought it still applied.)
She criticised the dress standards of New Zealanders — especially the wearing of jandals, then attacked the Maori race again on the grounds that they relied too much on government handouts and should get jobs.
But she has had more government handouts than most of us have had hot dinners.
And La Cieca, you ignorant person, Westenra was famous for being a busker before signing a big contract. Yeah, she sung on the street to raise money to make a sample CD. Not bludging off the government like these parasitic opera pricks.
Then there was the occasion when she stalked off the stage (Te Kanawa that is) when she was telling the audience off for using cellphones and cameras, and was upstaged by a baby that started to cry.
And her conflicts with other singers like Deborah Wai Kapohe (probably haven’t spelt that right) couldn’t have been to protect the great art, because Wai Kapohe was an opera singer.
But, still, we are all agreed that she is a vicious, nasty, jealous, execrable old piece of pond scum who has often attempted to destroy the careers of those who took any of the limelight she thought she was entitled to.
Let’s not pursue these feeble attempts to make excuses for her: it only makes us look almost as silly as she is.
It is official: She is an execrably jealous, risibly pretentious, brainless, malicious, vicious, snotty, up-her-self stinking piece of filthy pond scum.
Thank you.
Why does anyone care?
“Why does anyone care?” Well, um…ah…um. Ah, well, that is a rather difficult question to answer. It raises questions about psychological motivation, about the nature of and the mechanisms of human emotion, and other existential, epistomological, and ontological issues.
Care? Hmmm…. I once respected her but have grown more and more to think she is a snobbish up-herself and pretentions old bat.
Care? Our distinquished, cultured, remarkably intelligent and gorgeous hostess, La Cieca (I could go on but it is simply superflous to praise her [in stark contrast to that other creature]), has provided a thoughtful and penetrating analysis of a piece of news pertaining to the world of music and classical puritism versus what it sees as inferior, and given us the chance to add our own insights and thoughts.
And Liz says: “Oh who cares!”.
The issues involved touch apon a long running controversy and involve the very nature of art itself. Not everyone cares, true. But many are interested.
Those not interested are quite at liberty to wander off and make some cheese toasties or to look for porn on the torrents sites.
There is some background info on this site – amongst the links – some interesting stuff.
http://www.squidoo.com/kiri_te_kanawa_jealous_fake