About Janet Baker
Dame Janet Abbott Baker (born 21 August 1933) is an English mezzo-soprano best known as an opera, concert, and lieder singer. Baker is particularly closely associated with baroque and early Italian opera and the works of Benjamin Britten. During her career, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1980s, she was considered an outstanding singing actress and widely admired for her dramatic intensity, perhaps best represented in her famous portrayal as Dido, the tragic heroine of Berlioz's magnum opus, Les Troyens. As a concert performer, Baker was noted for her interpretations of the music of Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar. David Gutman, writing in Gramophone, described her performance of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder as "intimate, almost self-communing". == Biography and career == === Early life === Janet Abbott Baker was born in Hatfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where her father was an engineer as well as a chorister. Members of her family worked at Bentley Pit, in Doncaster. She attended York College for Girls and then Wintringham Girls' Grammar School in Grimsby. The death, when she was 10 years old, of her elder brother Peter, from a heart condition, was a formative moment that made her take responsibility for the rest of her life; she revealed this in a BBC Radio 3 Lebrecht Interview in September 2011. In her early years Baker worked in a bank, transferring to London in 1953 where she trained with Meriel St Clair and Helene Isepp, whose son Martin became her regular accompanist.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.