“I’VE never looked down on ‘popular’ music and often sang it – as a teenager, on recordings, and even now,” Kiri Te Kanawa tells “CityNews”.

“I’ve sung ‘I Believe’ for as long as I can remember and still do – along with ‘Climb Every Mountain’ and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and parts of ‘West Side Story’. I like those – and so do concert audiences and record buyers.”

That’s DAME Kiri to you and me, of course, since the ravishing NZ soprano was knighted in 1982, thus joining the ranks of stars we simply know as Dame Judi, Dame Joan, Dame Maggie and so on, without any need for a surname.

It’s hard to believe, but the glamorous diva will be at Llewellyn Hall in April, doing her favourite things.

“Of course, a singer has to be careful about whether a particular song actually suits their kind of voice,” she reminds me, so it won’t be a return to her pre-operatic youthful years when she was a pop star and scored the first NZ gold record ever.

Canberra audiences will get to hear operatic favourites by Mozart, Handel, Strauss, and Puccini and more, all accompanied by renowned NZ pianist Terence Dennis.

“A concert gives me the opportunity to bring forward a mixture of composers and considerable variation in music and song ‘images’,” she says.

Younger days are still green in her memory, though it wasn’t all fun. “Riding around singing ‘West Side Story’ wasn’t all I did,” she tells me, “I had a very firm singing teacher and a busy learning schedule… but in my young years, NZ was idyllic – and I still regard it like that.”

Dame Kiri still has a home in NZ and returns at least once every year – “there’s great fishing – I can’t go fishing in London or New York.”

Like many other wise divas, notably Dame Joan, she has largely abandoned the operatic stage in favour of the concert platform. Now 67, she concerns herself with nurturing young singers and musicians through her Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation.

“I realised that when I got round to retiring (which isn’t happening just yet) everything I’d learnt about the music world and its disciplines might just vanish with me… that’s why, in 2004, I established a foundation which focuses on my vision of offering young singers mentoring, financial support and most of all – career guidance,” she says.

Dame Kiri reports that the foundation’s first seven years have been “enormously successful”.

She’s particularly thrilled that Julia Lezhneva, a young Russian protégé she helped to study at the Guildhall, has just been signed to a contract with Decca Classics.

So, what about retirement?

“I decided that my season of Strauss’ ‘Rosenkavalier’ in 2010 was the last major operatic role I’d undertake,” she says.

“But soon after that the New York Metropolitan invited me to play the small cameo role of the comic Duchess in ‘Daughter of the Regiment’… so… it seems I haven’t totally left the stage, as long as I don’t mind playing an eccentric wacky Duchess.

“Actually, I loved it.”

Kiri Te Kanawa, at Llewellyn Hall, 7.30pm, Saturday, April 21 only. Bookings to 132849 or www.ticketek.com.au