---

Opera News

"a masterpiece of imagination. Baker touches perfection"

Janet Baker: From the Diary of Virginia Woolf
Songs by Argento, Debussy, Duparc, Fauré, Wolf.
Martin Isepp (piano) (1975). Texts & translations. d'Note Classics 1019

A 1975 broadcast from Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, features Janet Baker, then at the summit of her abilities, in Domenick Argento's cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, as well as songs and melodies by Wolf, Fauré, Duparc and Debussy. Spare yet lyrical, Diary sets eight brief entries from Woolf's thirty-two years of journals to form a sympathetic portrait of a heroically private, deeply troubled woman. Three of the entries are from the last year of Woolf's life, which ended with her suicide in April 1941. Baker touches perfection throughout, her wondrously level-headed reading of the text anchored by sere command of Argento's musical challenges. The pain of Woolf's "I can't conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941" cuts with blade-like truth; the elegiac melancholy of "parents" breaks with abrupt directness, as if a dream were troubled with thoughts of waking. The gradually whitening tone, as the despondent final entry shifts to a restatement of the more hopeful first, is a masterpiece of imagination. All is not unrelievedly serious. Baker airs the morning-after joys of "Le Secret" with sweet-toned finesse and offers a handsomely sunny "Mandoline." The program ends with "L'année en vain chasse l'anné: from Debussy's L'Enfant Prodigue, in which the chaste reserve of Baker and pianist Martin Isepp achieves an emotional power lacking when this aria is co-opted by sopranos of the shout-and-shake school.

Order :The Diary of Virginia Woolf

Back to d'Note's Classical Recordings