An Evening With Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Terence Dennis at The Bathurst Memorial Entertainment Centre

By the time she was twenty KiriTe Kanawa had won the major vocal prizes available in the South Pacific, and had also started her recording career - unusual for a prima donna in any era. She moved to London and studied at the London Opera Centre. After first appearing as Carmen in Britain and New Zealand, the young Te Kanawa was marked for Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, first at Sante Fe then at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1971.
After her sensational debut in Figaro Kiri Te Kanawa gained legendary status almost overnight and moved rapidly into the front rank of international opera. She became one of the most famous sopranos in the world, a familiar figure in the leading opera houses - Covent Garden, the Metropolitan, the Chicago Lyric Opera, Paris Opera, Sydney Opera House, the Vienna State, La Scala, San Francisco, Munich and Cologne. On the concert stage, her natural serenity and vocal beauty have joined with the world's major orchestral ensembles
- Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Symphony and the Boston Symphony under the baton of such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Sir Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, James Levine, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa and Sir Georg Solti. Created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1982, Kiri Te Kanawa has been conferred with honorary degrees from 11 Universities. She was invested with the Order of Australia in 1990 and the Order of New Zealand in 1995. In 2004 she gave a gala concert in Auckland to launch the Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation which aims to give support and financial assistance to dedicated New Zealand singers and musicians. Dame Kiri continues to perform in concert halls throughout the world with recent performances in Ireland, Hawaii, Australia, USA, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Korea, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Hong Kong.