Divorce, family woes 'harden' Dame Kiri

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SYDNEY - Dame Kiri Te Kanawa says setbacks in her personal life have made her put up a self-protective shield, an Australian newspaper reports.

Over the past three years, the diva has broken up with her long-time husband and manager, Desmond Park, and then stopped talking to long-lost half-brother Jim Rawstron after news of their reunion was leaked to a New Zealand newspaper.

She agreed that, while interviews up to five years ago projected a woman with a sunny disposition, more recent profiles indicated a more hardened person, Sydney's Sunday Telegraph reported.

"A bit like that," she said, adding that "I never let my guard down, ever," although she had not always been like that.

"I suppose it's just that, as life goes on, you tend to want to, well, it's not that I'm a control freak, but I like to know what's happening," she said.

"And I like to have control of my life. But that's all in the past. I feel good about it now and I have wonderful people around me. I have no fear, but I'm careful about who I meet now. "

On New Year's Day, Dame Kiri's voice welcomed the dawn of 2000 over Gisborne. She sang with Sir Howard Morrison in Rotorua on Saturday night at a concert marketed as A Knight With A Dame.

The England-based soprano, aged 55, said she would probably return to New Zealand when she decided to let the curtain fall on her singing career.

She found New Zealand both claustro-phobic, because of her high profile, and at times the freest place in the world, "because I have control of myself."

"I'm not working for anybody else," she said. "I don't have to do all the things people in my sort of position find them-selves having to do. I can go to New Zealand and not be met off an aeroplane. I can go whenever I like, disappear into the crowd and stay there.

"I have a place [in the Bay of Islands] no one can get to. I think that's important. I have my privacy."

Dame Kiri said she had mixed feelings about the touring associated with an operatic career. One disadvantage was the difficulty with long-established friend-ships. But she said of the past three decades since the Covent Garden debut that brought her to international notice: "I'd do it all again. Every minute of it." - NZPA