Kiri Te Kanawa - Waiata (2013) [Hi-Res]

When she was six years old Kiri stood on a chair and sang into the microphone of a provincial radio station. Twenty years later, international audiences were standing up from their chairs and giving ovations to one of the most beautiful soprano voices on the world music scene.

Besides conquering opera houses and concert halls on every continent her prodigious recording output includes Christmas music , classic and folk songs, oratorio, concerts with the world’s principal orchestras, seventeen major operas, musical theatre and offerings from composers including George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Paul McCartney.

Kiri was created a Dame in 1982, and has been awarded both the Order of Australia and the Order of New Zealand. She is an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, was presented with the International Achievement Summit award by Dame Julie Andrews, and has been inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. Honorary doctorates have been awarded to Dame Kiri from both Oxford and Cambridge and nine other universities.

Four decades and forty recordings later, she received the British Classical Recording industry’s Lifetime Achievement Award. With WAIATA Dame Kiri marks the fiftieth year of her recording career and her third all-Maori offering. Dame Kiri will celebrate her 70th birthday on March 6th 2014 with a return appearance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as the Duchess of Krakenthorpe in Donizetti’s ‘Daughter of the Regiment’.