Why did I get the feeling that anything I write about Baker would be construed as criticism? Oh well.
I mentioned Sills because her approach is very similar in my opinion. By the time she gets to the end of the opera the voice is tired and sometimes flat after all that emoting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K9ts--gDKY
The seeming detachment that Sutherland has in this opera paradoxically enhances the drama, and doesn't take away from it at all - makes it more regal, as it were. I used the word verismo for lack of a better term. What Sills hasn't done here (and as a rule this was her approach) she doesn't mine the MUSIC for the last drop of expression possible to squeeze out of it like Callas did.
A certain amount of detachment is necessary for a performer to project the emotion and not get swallowed up in it. In this clip of Sills, I don't hear the structured sentiments written into the score by the composer, instead, wave after wave of emotion. In instrumental music, perhaps, this is a bit clearer to comprehend, that expression is embedded in structure and style. Sutherland and Callas were superb musicians so understood how to project through the music and not outside its frame. I found that Dessay's approach to coloratura was frequently mistaken verismo (for lack of a better term again), screaming out high notes as bursts of emotion rather than the culmination of musical phrases that actually didn't require extra melodrama.
ZB
You won't get much argument out of me regarding Sills, though I always thought the reason for this over expressiveness (for want of a better expression), was the fact that she was forcing what was really a rather soubrettish voice beyond its natural means. For me, her most successful
bel canto role was Giulietta, which she sings on a studio recording of
I Capuleti e i Montecchi with, paradoxically, a superb Janet Baker as Romeo. Sills can still be a bit shrill on top, but, in this gentler role, she doesn't resort to the sort of explosive singing heard on the
Maria Stuarda recording you highlighted.
It's interesting that you should group Sutherland and Callas together as singers who understood how to express through the music and not outside its frame, when they are almost at opposite ends of the scale with regards to their approach. Callas was once supposed to have said about Sutherland, "That woman has put my work back fifty years." It may be apocryphal, and some say she was actually talking about Bonynge, but it's an interesting point. Callas's idea was to be as true to the composer as possible, coloratura was used only for dramatic expression, not just for dazzling display. There are plenty of instances where, when listening to Sutherland, all we are listening to is her fabulous voice and prodigious technique. I remember a review by Rodney Milnes, of the Sutherland/Pavarotti/Bonynge
Lucia di Lammermoor, in which he said, and I paraphrase from memory, "I strongly believe that somewhere amongst all this vocal showing off, high notes interpolated and held long past their natural use, their is a supremely dramatic Romantic opera trying to get out, in vain on this occasion." Callas actually saw Caballe, not Sutherland as her natural successor. If you see any of the excerpts from Caballe's
Norma at Orange on youtube, you can see why.
Coming back to Baker, I have always thought of her too as a singer who mines the MUSIC for every drop of expression, as you put it. The only piece of music both Baker and Callas sang was Marguerite's beautiful air
D'amour l'ardente flamme from Berlioz's
la Danmation de Faust. Though voice and method are so markedly different, it is amazing how similar their versions are, as if both had individually come to the same conclusions about the music. I heard Baker live many times, though unfortunately never in opera, only in concert, but even here she had a quiet intensity that would draw an audience in. One felt she achieved her effects through a deep understanding of the music she was singing, never imposing on it anything extraneous.
