With a career spanning four decades Dame Kiri Te Kanawa has established herself as one of the most popular lyric sopranos of all time with a devoted fan base, especially in Britain and here in Australia. This four-disc budget collection comprises what has been (plus a couple of what might have beens) to mark her 70th birthday.

The package is home brand rather than anything lavish, but the four discs are all excellent previously released recordings covering 1989 to 1997. Two are devoted to Italian opera – a 1990 compilation of Puccini, Verdi, Cilea, Giordano, Bolto and Leoncavallo favourites and a 1997 Puccini disc which includes three songs with piano accompaniment. But perhaps the cream of the set is the mainly French compilation Te Kanawa made with Jeffrey Tate and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in 1989, in particular a beautiful rendering of Berlioz’s L’année en vain chasse l’année from The Damnation of Faust.

No Te Kanawa collection would be complete without some Mozart and Richard Strauss, and these are provided on the fourth disc, but with them comes a pleasant surprise – a little Wagner with four arias, two from Tannhaüser, O Sachs! Mein Freund from Meistersinger and...