RETURN APPEARANCE : SOPRANO KIRI TE KANAWA IN AMBASSADOR RECITAL

With the considerable pleasures of hearing Kiri Te Kanawa sing “Depuis le jour” from “Louise,” a trip to Ambassador Auditorium paid off handsomely Sunday night when the soprano from New Zealand returned to Pasadena for her third local recital appearance in 20 months.

There were other payoffs in Dame Kiri’s latest visit: arias by Bellini and Puccini--”O quante volte” and “Vissi d’arte”--with which she closed the program proper, before encores, and with which she produced radiant sounds and healthy vocalism. And a group of lieder by Richard Strauss, sung gorgeously before intermission.

Otherwise, it was a pleasant but ordinary Te Kanawa performance, unilluminated by textual identification--even in English, the pretty singer does not connect with words and their meanings--or character definition. Musically, Te Kanawa remains correct, if hardly authoritative.

Her audience this time, a sold-out house full of enthusiasms, but discerning enough to withhold bravos until they were appropriate, appeared to enjoy itself immensely.

To this group of listeners, it hardly seemed to matter that every item on the program of familiar music has been sung in the recent past--if not last week--more tellingly, more effectively and with greater emotional identification, by singers not only of the generation ahead of Te Kanawa, but of the next crop, the coming generation. This soprano’s coolness under pressure may be admirable; the other side of that coolness ultimately reveals aspects of unfeeling in the artist.

Her program on this occasion consisted of three arias from Handel’s “Giulio Cesare”; Mozart’s motet “Exsultate, jubilate”; the Strauss group; five lounge-bar arrangements of so-called folk songs as made by the Australian film composer Douglas Gamley, and the arias. Four encores, beginning with “Summertime,” were forthcoming at the end.

At the piano, Martin Katz supplied the soprano with firm musical support, considerate partnering and many beauteous moments. He, too, is a cool customer--a cool merchandiser, actually, given the range of musical wares at his disposal--but he does deliver, and handsomely. So does Te Kanawa, if from a distance.