Kiri Te Kanawa From Mozart to Gershwin

Go to a record store and you will find her work in almost every vocal category.

Opera? Look in the Mozart, Puccini, Richard Strauss bins.

Lieder and songs? Try Berlioz, Ravel, Canteloube. But don’t overlook Gershwin or Broadway musicals.

Soprano Kiri Te Kanawa’s career has by now achieved an inclusiveness that rivals any modern diva’s. But she says that singing the crossover records was not entirely by her design.

“The possibility came up to do them, so I did them,” Te Kanawa said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. “You have a Leonard Bernstein who wants to do ‘West Side Story,’ so you don’t miss the opportunity. Which I did, which I was lucky enough to get.”

That album prompted other ventures into crossover repertory such as “South Pacific,” “My Fair Lady” and “Kiri Sings Gershwin.”

“ ‘South Pacific’ came out of the recording companies,” Te Kanawa said. “ ‘The King and I,’ ‘Carousel’--I looked at all of them. ‘South Pacific’ had been a film that came along as I grew up, way back in New Zealand.”

Did the theme of racial prejudice appeal to her as the daughter of an Irish mother and a Maori father?

“I never knew about racialism or anything,” she said. “In my innocence, I couldn’t understand what the problem was. . . Even to this day, I can’t understand what the problem was, simply because I am of Polynesian extraction myself, Maori, and married to a white person.

“I grew up looking at the world with the right colors in my head and my eyes. From my side, everything seems the right color. It’s always been like that.”

Te Kanawa, who will appear in recital Saturday at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, says that she enjoys making the recordings but is suspicious of the process.

“Sometimes the thing is unbelievable,” she said. “They can be truthful or nontruthful. I see virtually, in every single case, the tenor will stop just before the top-note (then do a separate take) . . . They do have the note, but not the confidence.

“I’ve been a bit guilty of doing some of those things in singing a difficult phrase I know I wouldn’t get through on stage,” she added. “I can’t sing it on stage, but I can do it on recordings. I can create my small amount of magic by doing those things. But most of my recordings are in three takes.”

Though born Down Under, Te Kanawa has lived in England with her husband and two children for 23 years. She calls it “my second home.”

But she retains her New Zealand citizenship and asserts: “I’ve never been anything else than a New Zealander.”

Some of her countrymen, however, disagree. She says she has been told, “You’ve deserted your country.”

“That is very sad,” she said, then insisted that “you do more out of your country than in it.

“The more you stay away from there, the more the country appears in the papers all the time,” she said.

“Americans, too, up to 10 years ago, had to bury themselves in Germany, had to go away, because they couldn’t get the big jobs (at home).”

Nonetheless, her own career was inspired by another Down Under singer, Dame Joan Sutherland.

“She was such a role model” (in making an international career), Te Kanawa said. “She is such an incredible person to come from that country . . . Yes, my career has risen in her shadow, but only in trying to achieve what she did.”

Te Kanawa considers herself out of that shadow now, though: “All of the singers out there today admire both of us. They are going to follow us as well. We prove that (an international career) can be done if you sacrifice enough.”

“I can honestly say I never (vocally) modeled myself on anybody,” she added. “I admired a lot of people . . . actors for their intensity, singers for their superb phrasing or delicate, appealing sounds.

“I listen to (Renata) Tebaldi and (Maria) Callas recordings. There are a lot of singers I listen to, but not in terms of competition. There are a lot of jobs out there. Everyone has a place. You can’t hog it all.”

Indeed? That attitude might surprise South Korean soprano Hei-KyungHong, who was pulled out of the opening-night cast of Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte” at the Metropolitan Opera last March because of Te Kanawa’s complaints, according to the New York Times.

“I never did that, not at all,” countered Te Kanawa. “It was an incredibly small incident. I think it was blown up in the press.

“Whatever is written in the paper is sent to the immigration department and is going to be seen as for or against my character,” she said. “If I want to get an H-1 visa to get into this country, the critics play an important part. . . . It would be very good for all journalists to realize how much damage they do when they decide to smear or get someone.”