Te Kanawa Turns Up the Charm

With her earned reputation for coolness, detachment and emotional distance, who would have expected Kiri Te Kanawa to be so charming, so accessible, so, well, human, in her latest local recital, Wednesday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion?

But she was. At the start of her recital with pianist Warren Jones, she bantered with the audience before singing a single note, definitely not diva behavior. It was practical as well as strategic: She gently asked her listeners to turn off their “mobile telephones,” recalling a recent incident when a ringing phone in the hall disrupted the event. (It worked, no cell phones or pagers were heard from.)

After she won points for charm and friendliness, the most famous soprano to come out of New Zealand in this century sang a recital of songs and arias from Mozart to Guastavino with her trademark beauty of tone and pointed musicality, adding three encores and sending her listeners home happy.

At 55, Te Kanawa’s voice is not as limpid, ravishing and perfect as it may once have been, yet it can still be thrilling, and worth the high fees she’s famous for. More important, her artistry has grown, broadened, deepened. We used to think of Te Kanawa as a mindless voice, because she always seemed to be somewhere else while singing. That is no longer the case.

With the versatile, supportive, musically pungent Jones at the piano, Te Kanawa delivered a lively and inspiring performance. She wasted no time on warmups; her opening group of music by Mendelssohn, Weber and Schubert engaged the brain as well as the ear.

Four lieder of Mozart proved pure of sound, probing of text, altogether engrossing. Then came the first peak, the best-known--for all the right reasons--songs of Henri Duparc: “L’invitation au voyage,” “Chanson Triste” and “Phidyle,” given all their due in luxuriant tone, telling phrasing and word-coloring. Jones’ important contributions here can not be overstated; he provided a carpet of sound on which the singer could work her magic, and he himself created much of that magic.

After intermission, the insights continued in a splendidly delivered Liszt group ending in a touching “Die Lorelei,” and Rachmaninoff’s ubiquitous Vocalise. The finale was Carlos Guastavino’s lightweight but charming “Flores Argentinas.”

The encores were a brief excerpt from Act 3 of Puccini’s “La Boheme,” the same composer’s aria from “Gianni Schicchi,” “O mio babbino caro” and Guastavino’s “La Rosa y Sauce.”