Janet Baker wins Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award

December 28, 2011

British singer Janet Baker won Gramophone magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award recently. Baker was an acclaimed master of both opera and lieder for more than 30 years. Janet Baker was born in August 1933. Her early interest in music was so keen that before she received her first piano as a young teenager, she often listened to the radio and “played” a large Victorian sideboard in her parents’ house. Baker began singing at weddings and funerals while working part-time as a receptionist. She auditioned for the BBC in 1955 and was soon singing on the radio where she was often compared to British opera singer Kathleen Ferrier. In 1982 she published a journal of her professional life in the last year “Full Circle”. 1982 was her last year as an opera singer, and the ‘circle’ which began with membership of the Glyndebourne chorus was completed with her farewell there as Gluck’s “Orfeo e Euridice”.