Barbara Cook at the Met

It is one of the ironies of a songstress's life that as her skill increases with experience, her endowments decrease with age. Barbara Cook is that rare (song)bird to beat this rap, as the new CD, Barbara Cook at the Met, amply demonstrates.

As presented by the Metropolitan Opera, this is the record of Cook's performance at the Met on January 20, 2006, the first time in 123 years that a female non-classical singer was so honored. Ms. Cook, a regular audience member at the Met, was thrilled to mount its stage. Even more thrilled, if possible, was the capacity audience of 3700, greeting her with a standing ovation.

In the booklet note, Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times marvels at the achievement of this 78-year-old whose voice has undergone only slight diminishment even as its "basic lightness and rosy bloom remain miraculously fresh." Cook conveys "a lifetime of feeling joy, pain and hard-won wisdom."

She had here a new pianist/music director, the excellent Eric Stern; the rest of her tried-and-true band consisted of Peter Donovan (bass), Jay Berliner (guitar), Jim Saporito (drums and percussion), and Lawrence Feldman (woodwinds). Many of the arrangements were by her beloved former bandleader, the late Wally Harper.

For those of us who remember her beginnings as a delicate, seemingly fragile ingénue, there is something wonderful about the transformation into the most maternal of presences, a sort of Junoesque magna mater. And even if you do not see her, merely hear her, you sense the unself-conscious self-assurance of someone who has seen it all, done it all, without becoming jaded.

The program comprises a judicious mixture of golden oldies and no less golden not-so-oldies, along with a couple of new ones gilded by her expert delivery. Actually, John Bucchino's "Sweet Dreams" can make it on its own; it is only Amanda McBroom's "Errol Flynn" that needs all the help it can get.

So here they all are: Rodgers with Hart or Hammerstein, Bock and Harnick, Coleman and Fields, Harold Arlen,[IMG:R] Irving Berlin, lots of Sondheim-even Frankie Lane and Carl Fischer. And, as a special bonus, welcome guest appearances by Audra McDonald and Josh Groban. Of added interest are the Gershwin rarity "Nashville Nightingale" and the traditional "Them There Eyes."

The beauty of it is that they don't sound homogenized. The singer transforms herself into whatever best suits the particular song, without however losing the limpidity that is her special strength.

And something else: Barbara Cook seems to be talking to us. By this I don't mean that, like Rex Harrison, she talks her songs in a sort of Sprechstimme. Rather, that her singing conveys such straightforwardness, such intimacy, such basic humanity that it comes across as someone talking to you. Otherwise put, most singers sound very different when they sing; they have separate speaking and singing voices. Barbara Cook always sounds roundedly and recognizably like herself.

Now, what, I ask you, could be better?