Sasha Cooke’s Davies Recital: Prima le parole

Mezzo Sasha Cooke (courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Last night mezzo Sasha Cooke returned to Davies Symphony Hall as recitalist in the latest installment of the Great Performers Series produced by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). She was accompanied at the piano by Kirill Kuzmin, currently Principal Coach for the Houston Grand Opera, making his debut under SFS auspices. The title of the program was how do I find you, a cycle of seventeen songs, each with music by a different composer and all receiving world premiere performances.

The only composer with whom Cooke had previously worked by Nico Muhly, since she had performed the title role in his Marnie opera. All of the composers were in their forties or younger. The idea of a cycle of songs by multiple composers emerged during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020. All but one of the resulting songs involved a partnership between composer and librettist. The one exception was Muhly, whose source was the seventeenth-century English poet Thomas Traherne. Nevertheless, Traherne’s reference to “Those hidden Plagues which/Souls may justly fear” was as relevant to living through pandemic circumstances as were the the texts by the sixteen contemporary authors.

Indeed, relevance was a key feature (if not the key feature) of all the texts that were set to music. It would not be exaggeration to say that every member of the audience could find reflections of the words Cooke sang with the recent past and current situations. All of the texts were printed in the program book and were also projected as supertitles. I should confess that, personally, I spent more time looking at the pages of the program book than I did looking up at the stage or the titles.

I like to think of a poem as an architecture to be “viewed” both in-the-large and in-the-small. My awareness of the overall structure of the text then guides me through my auditory awareness of how the music unfolds. However, I must confess that, last night, I was so drawn into the interplay of semantics and rhetoric in each poem that my attention to the music itself was significantly diminished. For what it is worth, I do not think I was the only one to experience the performance this way. Four of the contributing composers participated in a post-performance panel discussion; but almost all of that discussion tended to focus on the words themselves, rather than the contributions of the music.

Fortunately, the music will not be totally lost on me. Prior to preparing last night’s recital, Cooke and Kuzmin recorded all of the songs on an album with the same title as the program. That album became available on Amazon.com this past Friday. Currently, availability is limited to an MP3 album; but the Amazon.com download includes the booklet with the texts of the poems, affording an auditory experience comparable to that enjoyed by everyone in last night’s audience.

I plan to listen to this new release in the near future; and I am hoping that, having become familiar with the texts behind the seventeen songs in last night’s program, I can begin to cultivate a similar acquaintance with the music.