This week’s installment features her Idamante in an Idomeneo conducted by Colin Davis and co-starring Stuart Burrows and Yvonne Kenny, as well as a broadcast of her tremendous Penelope in Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria in which she nobly waited for the Ulisse of Benjamin Luxon who died late last month at 87.

Peter Hall’s production of the Monteverdi premiered at the Glyndebourne Festival in 1972. Today’s recording features that year’s cast together at a concert performance given at the Proms. Some may be familiar with Baker and Luxon from the film made at Glyndebourne the following summer with a slightly different cast.

This broadcast was one of the very first recordings I bought when I purchased my first reel-to-reel tape recorder in high school. I’d not previously heard Ulisse, and I listened to it over and over. Although today I recognize Raymond Leppard’s “realization” of the score can be extreme, I remain greatly affected by it and particularly by Baker and Luxon’s portrayals, as well as Richard Lewis’s touching Eumete and Alexander Oliver’s witty Iro.

Idamante was a role Baker only performed during this run of Götz Friedrich’s controversial production for Idomeneo’s premiere at Covent Garden. Baker’s most common Mozart stage roles were Dorabella which she performed with the Scottish Opera and Vitellia in which she was successfully (according to most) cast against type. Since I was sure that Magdalena Cononovici was not the first choice for Elettra, I did some investigating. I was surprised to discover that Gabriela Benackova was originally announced to perform the role!

Baker never appeared at the Met (or in any staged opera in the US), and neither did Kenny. Burrows sang often there during the 1970s, but Luxon sang just two performances of Eugene Onegin with the company in 1980.

ARTEK opens its 40^th season next month with three concert performances of Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria featuring rising tenor Richard Pittsinger (son of Patricia Schuman and David Pittsinger) as the returning hero.

Monteverdi: Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria

Penelope: Janet Baker
Minerva: Anne Howells
Melanto: Janet Hughes
Ericlea: Virginia Popova
Giunone: Vivien Townley
Fortuna: Patricia Craig
Amore: Laureen Livingstone
L’umana Fragilità: Annabel Hunt
Ulisse: Benjamin Luxon
Telemaco: Ian Caley
Eurimaco: John Wakefield
Iro: Alexander Oliver
Eumete: Richard Lewis
Nettuno: Clifford Grant
Giove: David Hughes
Antinoo/Tempo: Ugo Trama
Pisandro: John Fryatt
Anfinomo: Bernard Dickerson

London Philharmonic
Conductor: Raymond Leppard
Glyndebourne Festival Opera at Royal Albert Hall Proms
3 August 1972
Broadcast

Mozart: Idomeneo, Re di Creta

Ilia: Yvonne Kenny
Elettra: Magdalena Cononovici
Idamante: Janet Baker
Idomeneo: Stuart Burrows
Arbace: John Lanigan
High Priest: Thomas Allen
Neptune: Gwynne Howell

Conductor: Colin Davis
Royal Opera, Covent Garden
18 March 1978
Broadcast

The Baker Monteverdi and Mozart recordings can be downloaded by clicking on the icon of a cloud with an arrow pointing downward on the audio player above and the resulting mp3 file will appear in your download directory.

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