Despite farewell, soprano's not retiring type
Kiri Te Kanawa's career was launched in 1971, when she made a much-heralded appearance as the Countess in a Covent Garden production of "The Marriage of Figaro." Almost overnight she became known for a lyric soprano voice that sounded in a deep, plush legato. Now 63, and now Dame Kiri, she's preparing to say goodbye to life as a professional singer. Her final recital tour of North America comes to Symphony Hall Sunday, with a program that reaches from Mozart to Jake Heggie.
But don't use the word "retirement."
"Yes, it's a sort of farewell tour," she says by phone from New York, where she's rehearsing for a similar program at Carnegie Hall. "But then I get letters saying 'I hope you have a happy time in your retirement.' Well, I'm not retiring. It's farewell but not goodbye.
"I think it's been unfortunate that [it's being presented as though] this will be the last note I'll sing in my entire life," she continues, adding that she's leaving the door open to doing charity and fund-raising concerts. Nevertheless, she's firm that these are her last appearances on US stages. "I'll never be back to America except to see my friends," she says, "and to shop."
She prefers to think of it as "a transition into the next stage" of her life, one that will be dominated by her Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation, which provides support for young singers and musicians from her native New Zealand.
The foundation provides not only financial backing but a wide range of mentoring and career guidance as well. She advises students on whom to study with and when they should and shouldn't enter competitions. "If a singer is ill, I will take them to a specialist and the foundation will pay for it," she explains. "Or if they want special coaching, if they want to work with Mirella Freni, we'll pay for it."
Recently she looked at one singer's schedule and told her, "You're overworking, you're singing yourself to death." The advice: "When you get off the flight, turn off the telephone for five days and just stop."
It is, Te Kanawa points out, exactly the kind of assistance she never had when she was coming up. But she has neither regret nor bitterness; only the desire to make such services available to her fellow citizens.
In a similar spirit, she seems notably unsentimental about leaving the day-to-day work of being a professional singer. Asked if she had any words of farewell to her audience, Te Kanawa refers her questioner to Heggie's "Final Monologue," with words from a play by Terrence McNally. Pressed to elaborate, she says only that "in a lot of ways that will tell it."
Her meaning must await the concert, though one might note the following lines, spoken in the play by Maria Callas: "The sun will not fall down from the sky/ If there are no more 'Traviatas'/ The world can and will go on without us/ But I have to think that we have made this world a better place."
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A haven in Forest Hills
As you turn from busy Morton Street into Forest Hills Cemetery, you can still hear the rumble of the Orange Line and the rush of cars from the Arborway. Around a corner on a gently ascending hill, you encounter a magnificently imposing stone gate, built in Gothic Revival style, with two large towers flanking the main driveway. Entering a cemetery always means entering a different world, yet here the contrast seems especially stark: a serene, beautifully maintained oasis amid the slightly gritty urbanity of Jamaica Plain.
Connected to the gate is the tiny Forsyth Chapel, an exquisite space that seats just 140 people in eight rows of pews. Virtually all the light is filtered through stained-glass windows; during a recent afternoon visit, the sunlight was transformed into deep, opulent color. Beams of dark wood arch dramatically to the ceiling. The chapel - calling it a church seems to make it too big - gives the sense of some hermetic retreat, cut off from the world even more dramatically than the cemetery itself.
It's hard to think of a more intimate space in which to hear music, an activity that is becoming an increasingly important part of Forest Hills. The Borromeo String Quartet plays at Forsyth on Sunday, the fourth concert it has offered under the auspices of the Forest Hills Educational Trust. For the audience, this will be a chance to experience chamber music at extraordinarily close range.
For the quartet members, playing at Forsyth offers a combination of architectural and acoustic brilliance. In an e-mail exchange, first violinist Nicholas Kitchen wrote, "Forest Hills Cemetery has a very palpable feeling of connection to Boston's rich past, and that past goes back to the time in which much of the music that we play was written. Also, the chapel itself touches on the architectural beauty of the old European churches and has rich acoustics, but a size that makes the sound intimate in a way that is perfect for chamber music."
The Borromeo will play music by Haydn, Beethoven (the epic Quartet in B-flat, opus 130), and Shostakovich (the compact Seventh Quartet).
617-524-3354, foresthillstrust.org 