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Opera diva finds time for Maori folk musicClassic program ends with 'songs I love'Kenneth LaFave On the phone from London, Dame Kiri Te is asking about clay-pigeon shooting in Arizona. "Is it still legal there?" asks Te Kanawa, the New Zealand-born diva whose concert Oct. 2 at the Orpheum Theatre is already sold out. "With all the gun laws, I wonder." The interviewer assures her that, to the best of his knowledge, it is still legal in Arizona to blast flying clay discs with shotguns. This comes as a relief to the singer of some of the greatest Mozart and Strauss performances of the past half-century. Even so, Te Kanawa laments, she probably won't have time to engage in one of her favorite pastimes. Her Phoenix concert kicks off a 10-city North American tour with pianist Warren Jones, and there is much work to be done. Te Kanawa will sing the music of Mozart, Duparc, Rachmaninov, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Liszt and other Classical and Romantic masters. It's the sort of program that makes demands on the singer while putting the audience at luxuriant ease: The selections will include such familiar works as Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade and the Rachmaninov Vocalise. But with the encores comes a surprise. Instead of spirituals or the obligatory nod to American art song, Te Kanawa will sing Maori folk songs, a thing both as unexpected, given the diva image, and as natural, given the singer's true roots, as her fondness for skeet. For Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Commander of the British Empire, praised almost universally for her "creamy, rich" sound, her Countess in Marriage of Figaro and her Strauss anything, is a direct descendant of the great Maori warrior Te Kanawa. The diva Te Kanawa speaks with enthusiasm about the songs, which are also featured on her latest compact disc from EMI Classics, Maori Songs, due in stores Oct. 5: "These songs were the background to my childhood in New Zealand. Many of them I knew in my early days, as most New Zealand people do. "Music and singing have a special place in the Maori tradition. In ceremonies and in entertainment, the rich sounds of the Maori language lend themselves to melody and singing." The audience can expect the songs to sound "very Polynesian, very South Pacific," she says. Having conquered the opera houses of the world, Te Kanawa's thoughts have been going back to New Zealand more these days. She recalls when she nearly lost her life in a boating accident there: "The boat capsized and my father and I and one other person were trapped underneath it. My father walked under the water with me on his shoulders. He had great breath control and would catch a breath when a wave broke. I was 12 and I remember screaming the whole time." Te Kanawa will return to the scene of her near-death to celebrate a birth: the new millennium. "At 5:48 a.m. exactly, the first light of the new millennium will hit the first landmass, in New Zealand. It will happen there, on Gisborne Beach, where I played for 12 years," Te Kanawa says. She'll be there, with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, for the Official Dawn Ceremony, singing Maori songs and operatic arias to greet the new era. The concert, titled "2000 Today," will be telecast around the globe. Her decision to sing Maori folk songs is no different from her decision to sing anything else. "I sing the songs I love," she says, adding that finding them is easy but that finding someone to perform them with is not. "When you meet an accompanist, it can be immediate love or immediate hate, the best thing ever or a definite never. I prefer to go back to the ones I've already fallen in love with, such as Warren Jones. Warren is very special. It's amazing that he can mold himself to fit what the singer wants -- or is it that the singer molds to fit him? It's difficult to tell which, and that's exciting."
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