Conventional devices
that she does use, such as trills and other ornaments, come off quite differently:
they're not icing on the cake but part of the cake. "They have to be," Baird
points out. "In the baroque era, they're meant to be a big aspect of the harmony.
People talk about trills like they're adding an ornament to a Christmas tree.
But it has to be part of the sound. In the baroque era, the function of a
lot of ornaments is to create tension with the bass. By Mozart's era, trills
stop being a point of dissonance but are shimmering, rococo effects. They're
part of the sound concept."
Though hardly a professorial
presence, the effervescent Baird has a catalog-like knowledge of ornamentation,
not just the speed of a trill (French is much slower than Italian) but ways
of approaching them so they're part of the musical fabric. The key lies in
the appoggiatura: "It has to be longer than the trill, with less vibrato and
louder. That keeps it from being this flippant little thing. Handel's ornaments
for Ottone are full of dissonant notes that are lingered upon, even though
it's against all the rules of harmony." Then there's rhythmic ornamentation
-- various types of rubato possible in strictly architectural baroque music.
Yet Baird can't help
being a paradox: she's a performer and has the temperament that goes with
it. "Musicologists don't want to make the music their own, they want to make
it the composer's. That's the dilemma. You get a noncommittal performance.
It's a cold-blooded approach. But in the eighteenth century, the music was
a blueprint -- at best -- for what happened onstage," she says. "I have a
more humanist approach. Let's do away with 'authentic' practices if they alienate
the audience. Let's do away with the fear of taking chances."
Though the results
can't help being spontaneous and exciting -- in fact, she improvises many
ornaments, or at least chooses one on the spot from five different possibilities
-- she hasn't won herself a place among the oft-recorded British early-music
specialists, with the exception of Christopher Hogwood. "It's the individualistic
approach that I take -- it rubs them the wrong way," she said. "It's hard
to be a singer when you're supposed to stumble from one Svengali figure to
another, being molded in their own image. And when a singer has to try to
change what her voice is, it's easy to lose track of who she is."
No doubt, some of
this individuality can be attributed to having grown up singing opera in places
where she was more likely to become a country-music singer. Born in Statesville,
North Carolina, but raised in the Appalachian Mountains, Baird had singing
jobs with churches as a teenager and saved up the money for Mozart opera recordings.
Her idols were the strong-minded singers, like Maria Callas. Her first taste
of "authentic" performance came at the Eastman School of Music, where Eric
Schwandt (now at the University of Victoria in British Columbia) picked her
out of a class and coached her on French baroque styles. She also studied
for a year with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, though she was often puzzled by how
his theories translated into his casting: "He seemed to choose singers who
were the house Wagnerian sopranos."
Putting her dissertation
at Stanford on hold (a hiatus that lasted some thirteen years), she began
her professional singing life and almost immediately began making recordings,
such as Joshua Rifkin's much discussed 1982 reading of Bach's B-minor Mass
(Nonesuch 79036-2). Whatever one thinks of Rifkin's theory that in Bach's
time the soloists also comprised the chorus -- prompting many to call it the
"B-minor Madrigal" -- every note is audible and is a superb ensemble effort
from Baird. However, the "white" sound Rifkin draws from Baird seems particularly
straitjacketed in their 1987 recording of the Bach cantata "Jauchzet Gott
in allen Landen" (Oiseau Lyre 417616), in which she sounds like a boy soprano.
What a difference there is in her Bach Arias with Flute recording that came
out last year on Newport Classic (NPD 85530), in which she responds with great
rhetorical variety, color and immediacy. It's one of her best.
Though she recorded
Monteverdi's Orfeo with John Eliot Gardiner (Archiv 419250) and, just last
year, the role of the Second Woman in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Hogwood
(Oiseau-Lyre 436992), her most characteristic efforts are found on smaller
labels -- Newport and Vox for big baroque operas and oratorios, Dorian for
recitals. She is joined by a loose network of sympathetic but lower-profile
collaborators that include conductor Rudolph Palmer, keyboardist Colin Tilney,
lutenist Ronn McFarlane and perhaps most notably, John Ostendorf, the bass-baritone
turned recording producer.
In the opera repertory
-- which she seldom performs onstage, because her two children, aged six and
eight, rule out long stints away from home in Haddonfield, New Jersey -- the
majority of the works are recorded world premieres. She sings the title role
in Alessandro Scarlatti's Ishmael (Newport 85558/2), a 1683 oratorio with
operatic aspirations, especially in the more musically austere final scenes,
when she is wasting away in the desert. Baird conveys the drama by scaling
down her voice in one of the most convincing portrayals of physical exhaustion
since Maria Callas' recording of Mimì's farewell from La Bohème. Baird has
also recorded lots of Handel, including Imeneo (Vox V2U-9000), written late
in the composer's opera career, when he was relaxing the formalities of opera
seria. Thus, Baird's character has a disarmingly stark arioso for harpsichord
and cello obbligato, a proto-Mozartean trio with two other characters (unusual
in Handel operas) and an extended dramatic recitative, as well as arias putting
her through more conventional vocal paces.
Siroe (Newport 60125)
and Ezio (Vox 2-7503), among Handel's lesser stage works, offer fewer opportunities
for Baird. One of her best all-around Handel recordings is Sosarme (Newport
85575), a second-tier opera that's treated to an unusually good cast, including
John Aler and Drew Minter, with Baird's character having the first-class aria
"Vola l'augello del caro nido." Her Acis and Galatea (Newport 60045) is perhaps
the most satisfying version of this piece on disc. Also worth hearing is her
Messiah (Vox 2-7502), a lively, period-instrument recording in which she brings
startling freshness to music that would appear to have revealed all its secrets
long ago.
The lynchpin of her
Handel discography is Handel Arias (Newport 85530), with a few choice selections
recycled from previous recordings plus some new items that show off the remarkable
diversity demanded of singers at that time. One doesn't realize how effortful
much modern Handel singing is until one hears an almost complete absence of
this quality in Baird.
In many ways, her
most fully realized opera portrayal is Serpina in Pergolesi's La Serva
Padrona with Ostendorf and Palmer (Omega OCD 1016). Even as a stereotypical
opera-buffa character -- an impertinent maid finding her way into the affections
of her grumpy master -- she delivers a beguiling, thoughtfully shaded characterization.
She performs a similar minor miracle with Vespetta in Telemann's Pimpinone
(Newport 60117), a Germanic twist on buffa conventions. I asked Baird how
she enlivens such characters, and the answer lies in the recitatives. "That's
where a lot of singers have a hard time. The first time I looked at one, it
was a rhythmic pain in the neck. But the moments at which you want the audience's
attention are in the recitatives," she says.
Her recital recordings allow her to dip back into pre-opera musical history.
The English Lute Song (Dorian 90109) finds Baird using a number of
exotic ornaments, including the frisson-inducing glottal articulation, somewhere
between a giggle and brief coloratura cadenza. "It gives the impression
of virtuosity, but not every note is being touched," she says. "You'd
find that if you slowed down the tape." But there are no illusions in
her performance of John Dowland's "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" on
Greensleeves: A Collection of English Lute Songs (Dorian 90126). There
her voice is scaled down to a vibratoless thread, stripped of anything vaguely
resembling conventional expressive device. Yet it finds the music's deep well
of sadness in a manner that conveys the utter devastation indicated in the
text, a feeling intensified when the voice swells slightly to ride the discreet
but jarring forays into chromaticism. Because she uses so few of the modern
traditional expressive devices that can stand between music and listener,
her performances seem almost disarmingly confiding.
Songs
of Love and War (Dorian 90104) is in some ways
an even greater triumph, given that the stylistic and ornamental requirements
of the Monteverdi and Caccini selections can make the music seem remote, even
obscure. Yet Baird makes such sense of them that the music seems more organically
wrought and all the richer for it: she often gives a repeating sequence of
notes an element of surprise with a discreet ornamentation that drives home
the architectural variety and unity. Her Mozart Songs (Dorian 90173),
with Colin Tilney at the fortepiano, are notable for Baird's willingness to
meet them on their own terms. As wonderful as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was in
this repertory, the songs still seemed like poor cousins to Schubert, because
that kind of "operatic" voice sets up grander expectations. With
Baird, passages that normally would inspire histrionics are given instead
a more subtle change in energy and tension.
Some of her future projects may come as a shock. She'll break out of the good-girl
baroque roles with a new recording of the multi-fanged title role in Handel's
Berenice -- one of her biggest so far. She'll depart from the baroque
altogether for the original version of Schubert's Wintereisse with
fortepiano. She's assembling a one-woman show titled "Mad Bess, or Glimpses
of Insanity in the Age of Reason" that will include Purcell and Blow
songs about madness, as well as accounts of how mental institutions were often
treated like tourist attractions. Nowadays she has the voice for such things:
"As singers get older, there are more colors in their voice. If you start
with lots of vibrato, you get a wobble. But if you start with no vibrato,
you get some."
The most curious thing about the Baird voice is its apparent lack of different
registers. Ostendorf has never figured it out: "She even has a low baritonal
area that she rarely gets into, but when she does, she has no problem barreling
down there in ranges that a real mezzo has trouble with." How does she
do it? For once, she's at a loss for words. Perhaps it's the final mystery
of the human voice: "I just don't know what to tell you."
MR. STEARNS, a music and theater critic for USA Today, is also
music correspondent for The Independent in London.
