Saturday 12th April
Film: Janet Baker In Her Own Words (2019)
Dir. John Bridcut
2.00pm (1 hour 40 minutes)
Ludlow Assembly Rooms
Tickets go on sale in January 2025. Festival passes are now available.
Tickets £25, including entry to the live event ‘Janet Baker in Conversation with John Bridcut’ at 4.00pm.
More than thirty years after her retirement, Britain’s greatest classical singer of the 20th century, Dame Janet Baker, talks more openly and emotionally than ever before about her voice, her career and her life today.
With excerpts of her greatest stage roles (Dido, Mary Stuart, Julius Caesar and Orpheus), as well as of her appearances in the concert hall and recording studio (works by Handel, Berlioz, Schubert, Elgar, Britten and Mahler), she looks back at the excitements and pitfalls of public performance. She tells the film-maker John Bridcut about the traumatic loss of her elder brother when she was only ten years old, and how that experience coloured her voice and her artistry. She explains why she felt the need to retire early some thirty years ago, and discusses the challenges she and her husband have to face in old age. She also gives tantalizing clues to the question her many fans often ask: does she still sing today at the age of 85?
“No one matches the director John Bridcut when it comes to documentaries about musicians. His new film, Janet Baker In Her Own Words, is among his most sensitive and moving yet. Unmissable.”
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer
| FILM CREDITS | |
| Written, narrated and directed by | John Bridcut |
| Photography | Jonathan Partridge |
| Additional photography | Richard Numeroff, Damian Wohrer |
| Sound | Patrick Boland, Paul Paragon |
| Additional sound | Sean O’Neil, Zach Hoover |
| Archive research | Alex Cowan, Val Evans |
| Production research | Bethan Anwyl-Ross, Lloyd Hann |
| Production managers | Amy Gostling, Fay Thompson |
| Dubbing mixer | Rowan Jennings |
| Colourist | Michael Sanders |
| Online editor | Dominic McMahon |
| BBC commissioning editor | Jan Younghusband |
| Assistant producer | Oliver Soden |
| Film editor | Riaz Meer |
John Bridcut
John Bridcut has made some sixty documentaries over the past thirty years or so, many of them on classical music.
His most recent music film is Michael Tippett, The Shadow and The Light, which followed composer-portraits of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Parry, Delius and Britten (twice). His film Janet Baker in Her Own Words has been widely acclaimed. As well as Dame Janet, the artists he has profiled include Bernard Haitink, Sir Colin Davis, Rudolf Nureyev, Jonas Kaufmann, Herbert von Karajan and Mstislav Rostropovich. John believes nobody else has filmed Schubert’s Winterreise at the top of a mountain pass in Switzerland with 80 cm of snow, which he did with Benjamin Appl and James Baillieu. He has also written two books: Britten’s Children and Essential Britten. John’s love of English song goes back to his university days, when he organised two Festivals of English Song in Oxford.
