For the Operatic Faithful, a Long-Awaited Audience With a Goddess of Song

When dawn breaks over New Zealand at 5:48 a.m. on New Year’s Day, the renowned voice of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa will be the first to herald the new millennium to the world. But before the old millennium will have ended, the divine diva from Down Under finally made her Los Angeles debut at a sold-out single appearance Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Dame Kiri’s stellar career began when she took the opera world by storm in 1971 with her debut as the countess in “The Marriage of Figaro” at Covent Garden. Movie-star svelte at 55 in a glamorous red satin strapless gown (no sign of kimono arms here, dear hearts), she was accompanied Wednesday by piano virtuoso Warren Jones. The audience was smitten.

“I’ve followed her concerts around the world, and I’ve never heard a better accompanist,” said L.A. fan Ken Stokes, who bought his ticket months ago. “I’ve always loved her voice--my college roommate even named his daughter Kiri!”

After two standing ovations and three encores, including her signature aria, Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro,” the two artists were feted at a reception in the Impresario Ristorante atop the Pavilion. L.A. Opera’s retiring major-domo, Peter Hemmings, who hosted the soiree for longtime opera supporters, was euphoric: “I have about 500 third cousins in New Zealand. And I’m delighted to have Kiri here at last.”

Gregg Anderson of the New Zealand Tourist Board co-hosted the bash, which featured typical Anzac country fare: oysters, mussels, roast lamb, Pavlova for dessert and New Zealand wines. Among the opera stalwarts spotted at the buffet were Jacqueline and Richard Colburn, Barbara Abercrombie and Robert Adams, Leslie and John Dorman, Warren Schubert, Alice and Joe Coulombe, Carol and Warner Henry, Jennifer and Royce Diener, Barbara and Ian White-Thomsom, Nancy and Dick Cole, David Barry, Alicia and Ed Clark, Annabelle and Lorin Wilson, Jude and Leonard Green, Alisa Cone Camberlan, W. Allan Edmiston, Barbara and Garry Marshall and many more.

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It’s no fun belonging to an elite corps if you don’t gather once in a while to get a gander at one another. That’s why, more than 60 years ago, the late Mary Foy and Charlotte Workman Masson founded a group known as First Century Families. Comprising descendants of those who came to Southern California within 100 years of the city’s founding in 1771, the group meets once a year to focus on the days when our megalopolis was just a dusty little pueblo.

Now, remember, you can’t just join this organization. Sure, being well-bred and well-wed counts for something, but one’s forebears also had to have arrived by stagecoach. “It’s almost incest,” noted the young scion of a venerable land-grant family as she surveyed the crowd in the ballroom of the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel on Wednesday. A granddaughter of the late Neil McCarthy, Honore McCarthy Rausch, chaired the event, and Elizabeth Baur Springer of the Gless/Amestoy clan emceed. More than 300 local Brahmins turned out for the 61st annual event, which took the sesquicentennial of the California Gold Rush as its theme. The guest list for this intertribal powwow reads like an old California Social Register: Bandini, Sepulveda, Ortega, Rindge, Chandler, Verdugo, del Amo, Workman, Rowland and Duque, among others. Peter Blodgett, curator of the Huntington Library’s current exhibit, “Land of Golden Dreams: California in the Gold Rush Decade,” spoke about the era that changed California’s destiny.

Patt Diroll’s column will appear each week. She can be reached at pattdiroll@earthlink.net.