Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke advocates for the music of Alma Mahler

Sasha Cooke has enjoyed her share of success performing in operas and presenting solo recitals, but her reputation has been built on appearances with more than 80 symphony orchestras worldwide.

She is most associated with Gustav Mahler, who never wrote an opera but fused the worlds of art song and symphony, especially in the Second, Third and Fourth symphonies from his so-called Wunderhorn period, all of which contain important vocal parts.

“Different voices, different temperaments are suited to different composers,” Cooke said. “In my case, my voice and my temperament do meet Mahler well. He writes a lot of really wonderful music for my voice type, often an intuitive, introspective and philosophical type of content.”

But it will be in the music of a different Mahler that Cooke makes her Ravinia debut July 19, joining Marin Alsop and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in orchestral arrangements of four songs by Gustav Mahler’s wife, Alma. She wrote nearly 50 art songs and was a student of noted composer Alexander von Zemlinsky.

Also on the program is Gustav Mahler’s Blumine, a short work originally written as a movement for his Symphony No. 1 and later removed, and his Symphony No. 5. “I think there is a lot in common between her writing and Gustav’s writing,” Cooke said of the famed wife and husband. “I love that this program pairs the two, because I think that will become very apparent.”

Cooke typically has bustling summers performing at varied festivals, but her new post as co-director of the Lehrer Vocal Institute at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, has kept her even busier than usual. “This summer I’m home four days,” she said. “Next summer, it’s something similar. It’s what I signed up for. I’m excited about all of it.”

Her career is too jam-packed to take on a university or conservatory teaching position, so she was delighted when this summer opportunity became available at the Music Academy, where she studied in 2002. “It’s really special,” she said. “I never imagined that sort of position being offered to me, but it’s in a place that I love, that made a big impact on me, and it’s just the right amount of teaching.”

“There is a lot in common between Alma’s and Gustav’s writing. I love that this program pairs the two, because I think that will become very apparent.” — Sasha Cooke

Among the multiple summer engagements that she has interspersed with her teaching, she is particularly looking forward to one of the most famous works by, no surprise, Gustav Mahler — Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), an orchestral song cycle for two voices and orchestra. Written toward the end of his life in 1908-09, it offers a meditation on life, death and eternal renewal. “I love it,” Cooke said. “It’s in my top three [favorite works]. Absolutely. Maybe my favorite thing to sing.”

The tenor and mezzo-soprano (or baritone) are each featured in three of the six movements, with the mezzo-soprano showcased in the final movement, Der Abschied (The Farewell), which runs nearly 30 minutes and is by far the longest and arguably the most profound of the sections.

“Honestly, the pieces with more singing, they give you more time to settle,” Cooke said. “The pieces with two minutes or five minutes of singing are harder in a way. So, here you have Das Lied with this 30-minute final movement for the mezzo, and I just absolutely love it. You have so much material to play with and it’s incumbent on you that you create that atmosphere and that narrative and meaning.”

Later this month in Colorado, she will perform Das Lied with conductor James Conlon and the Aspen Festival Orchestra at the Aspen Music Festival on July 23 and again July 30 in the smaller-scale Arnold Schoenberg arrangement for 13 instruments with conductor Alan Gilbert and the SummerFest Chamber Orchestra at the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest.

Born in Riverside, California, Cooke moved as a child with her family to College Station, Texas, where her parents obtained dual positions teaching Russian. She never gave any thought to becoming a singer growing up, but she regularly attended operas starting when she was 5 or 6 years old. “This is all just normal to me,” she said. “Later I discovered that not every kid did that.”

Someone heard her sing in high school and recommended voice lessons, which Cooke thought might help her compete in choir. Later, a friend urged her to audition for the voice program at Rice University in Houston, and she was accepted, much to her surprise. “That was basically my story everywhere,” Cooke said. “I would audition somewhere thinking, ‘There’s no chance.’ And I would get in. Go somewhere else. ‘There’s no chance.’ And I would get in. It felt like the red carpet rolled out when I started trying to sing and pursue that path.”

She went on to study at the Juilliard School, and unlike many singers who have taken part in perhaps two or three apprentice programs and summer institutes, Cooke participated in eight. Besides the Music Academy of the West, they included the Metropolitan Opera’s prestigious Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute in August 2006. She gradually began to be noticed, and her professional career took off.

In 2010-2013, Cooke and her family lived in Chicago, because she was singing frequently at Chicago Opera Theater, and her in-laws resided in nearby Wisconsin. But a drawback was the difficulty getting to and from O’Hare Airport. So, they moved to a wooded area just outside Houston, in part to be closer to her parents. “For me, it’s really easy access to the airport,” she said, citing another major reason. She acknowledged that Texas does sometimes take its knocks nationally for its conservative politics. “But living there, it doesn’t really feel that way,” she said. “It feels spacious and green and affordable.”

Cooke opens her fall season with two back-to-back opera productions. She will appear in the San Francisco Opera’s production of Mason Bates’ opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, singing the role of the computer pioneer’s wife, from Sept. 22 to Oct. 7. It is her first return to the work since she sang in the 2017 world premiere at the Santa Fe Opera. A subsequent recording won a 2019 Grammy Award for best opera recording, one of two such honors that Cooke has received in her career. She will subsequently appear in the world premiere of Joby Talbot’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at the Dallas Opera on Nov. 3-11.

It’s no coincidence that these two operas are both contemporary, because she is most associated with such repertoire. “It’s what became available to me in the beginning,” she said. “When I was at Juilliard as a student, I remember saying that contemporary music was my most favorite. I liked the challenge. Over the years, that relationship has changed, because sometimes it can be too much of a good thing.”   

So if there is anything she would change about her career, it would be adding more traditional operatic roles to her schedule. “That has been my one thing I haven’t been able to accomplish. All the roles that I’ve done on stage — I’ve either never heard of them before or they were just written, so I’d like to sing a few things, just a few things, not everything but a little bit more in the lyrical mezzo repertoire.”

But she is in no way complaining. “I hear myself — wah, wah – as if it’s a big deal,” she said. “I’m singing in great places, doing great things with wonderful people. What else do you want?”