Singer ‘second fiddle’ at home

Press, 13 May 1987, Page 24

Singer ‘second fiddle’ at home

PA London New Zealand’s worldacclaimed opera singer, Kiri Te Kanawa, gladly accepts a role as second fiddle in the home, but admits to guilt about the restricted time she has with her children.

Dame Kiri said, in an interview with London’s “Today” newspaper, as she prepared for a sellout concert at the Royal Albert Hall:

“I’m a very guilty mother. If there’s a word that describes the way most working mothers feel about themselves, I think that’s it.

“I always want to be with my children. Even when I go shopping. I’ll go to the children’s shops first. Wherever I am, wherever I’m going. I’ll always have a mass of gifts for them, which is guilt.

“When I’m with them I give them as much of myself as I can. Otherwise I plan for them to be so occupied, so exhausted, that they don’t want, to know me.” Dame Kiri said that

when she went roller-skat-ing with her 11-year-old daughter Toni recently (she also has an eight-year-old son, Thomas), “she almost died. She said to me, ‘lf you fall over, Papa will never speak to me again’. She’s a little worrier.”

The 42-year-old singer said that, in the home, her mining engineer husband, Desmond Park, was "absolute boss.”

"It’s always been like that and that’s how I like it. He’s a very strong, sure, stable man, very Australian. He will tolerate no fool.

“Even our daughter won’t really challenge him and she can say a lot to him that I can’t. I like children to speak their minds. I don’t like them to be dominated.

“It’s healthy and I listen to Toni a lot. I used to be so frightened — I still am — of new situations that I could hardly speak.” Dame Kiri, who has homes in London, New York, Portugal and New Zealand, has recently entered the world of popular music — record-

ing “West Side Story,” “South Pacific,” Gershwin songs, and the bestselling "Blue Skies.” “Today” noted she had been criticised for the change. Dame Kiri responded: “People say, Oh, you’ve turned into a pop singer. Hardly. I love Sister Sledge, Van Halen, people like that. If anything, I think I’ve turned into a popular performer.” Dame Kiri told “Today”

that opera suffers from an image problem — something she would like to see changed. “There is a new, younggeneration audience out there that thinks opera singers are fat, old, boring ladies. I don’t want to manipulate, but my approach is I’m going to sing songs that you might like, but I’ve also got some others you’ve never heard before.

“People always think opera is too highbrow, that it’s a snob’s world and they don’t understand it. They’re always putting themselves down. But in fact, those are the people we need. What I’m not interested in are the musical snobs.” Next month Dame Kiri will record an album of Mozart arias, and perform Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Vienna Opera. She will then attend Italy’s Ravenna Festival with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and in July give a recital tour of Japan and Hong Kong with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra.