Kiri Te Kanawa at the BBC

Editorial

BBC Four

BBC 4

Soprano Sundays

Music: Classical: Opera

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

BBC Four celebrates some of the most well-known sopranos.

BBC Four celebrates some of the most well-known sopranos, leading up to Maria Callas’s centenary at the start of December.

BBC Four HD

Kiri Te Kanawa

Andy King-Dabbs

Mark Cooper

Soprano Sundays: Kiri Te Kanawa at the BBC

Documentaries

05/03/2017

BBC Four - Soprano Sundays, Kiri Te Kanawa at the BBC

The New Zealand soprano looks back at her life in song through 40 years of performances.

New Zealand soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa looks back at her life in song through 40 years of performances from the archives, including rugby anthem World in Union on Top of the Pops.

The charismatic New Zealand soprano Dame Kiri Te Kanawa looks back at her life in song through forty years of classic performances from the BBC archives, from her first TV performance on The Harry Secombe Show in 1971 to her appearances on Top of the Pops to sing the rugby anthem World in Union in 1991, plus performances from the Last Night of the Proms and Terry Wogan's chat show.

Dame Kiri's dramatic and operatic skills are captured in the Royal Opera's production of Puccini's Manon, she describes working with Leonard Bernstein, Georg Solti and on Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio, and she recalls the royal wedding in 1981 at which she sang Handel's Let the Bright Seraphim to a global TV audience of 700 million.

There's documentary footage of the house where Kiri grew up in New Zealand (now a car park), she vividly evokes the East End of London, where she studied as a student when she first came to London, and we see her goofing around on the golf course with Placido Domingo.

As Dame Kiri says in her candid new interview for this programme in which she reflects on her BBC appearances, "If I look back what you have is snippets of my life, I suppose.".

Knowledge, arts, music and culture from the UK and the world.

BBC Four reflects arts, music and culture with an ambitious range of intellectually and culturally enriching programmes, taking an expert and in-depth approach to its subjects.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Soprano Sundays

Kiri Te Kanawa at the BBC

Contributors

Genres

Formats

Brand

BBC Four

About BBC Four