What’s Cooke-ing at the Academy

Two-time Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke didn’t hold back in describing her single summer as a vocal fellow at the Music Academy back in 2002.

“It changed my life,” she said last week. “Part of it had to do with Marilyn Horne and the incredible faculty, including John Churchwell, but a big part was also that I was only 19 when the average age of the vocal fellows was 26. I was surrounded by incredibly inspiring singing and also saw how they had such disciplined practice. It blew my mind… I left a very different person.”

Confirmation of her experience came from her father after the summer, at a time when her parents were still helping the teenage Cooke with her credit card bills. “He told me, that was when you stopped shopping and started practicing all the time.”

Twenty-two years later, Cooke has come full circle with her Academy adventure as this summer is her first as co-director with Churchwell of the Lehrer Vocal Institute, a position that has her involved in creating the vocal programming, selecting the fellows, working with the faculty and guest artists, teaching master classes, performing, and more.

“There’s no way I could have imagined [doing this] back then, but it’s the right time in my career,” she said. “I love teaching and I had started to think about the alternative to traveling to 35 places a year, but I wasn’t at all wanting to give up singing. This was the perfect in between, because I can do a lot of the admin work wherever I am in the world, and then come to Santa Barbara to teach and perform in the summer. There’s no place I’d rather be.”

Cooke said she’s thrilled to be inheriting the reins from Horne, one of her heroes, tasked with taking the Academy to the next level. 

“It’s a perfect place because there’s a certain kind of expansiveness and air and space to be creative here, both because of its intimate size, being removed from a city, and the beauty of the campus. You can find yourself and do new things.”

Cooke said that increasing the ability to curate and tailor the program to the participants’ specific interest and skills is paramount to her purpose, especially the vocal fellows, a vastly talented group who were among the only 2.5 percent of applicants selected. 

“We asked each of them, what are you hoping to achieve this summer and how can we help you get there, empowering them to speak up. I don’t think anywhere else reaches out to the individual singers that way… But it’s important for young musicians these days to figure out what they offer that no one else does, which influences their song repertoire and what a piece tells us about them, so they get clued into their own individual authentic story.” 

Cooke and Churchwell are also implementing a few “experiments” this summer, including having the opera and dancing directors do intensives on techniques rather than being on hand for weeks, and Cooke’s own behind-the-scenes conversation series each Friday covering such topics as mental health, taxes, diversity, equity, inclusion, balancing career and family, body shaming, auditions, management, and what to expect in a life as a performer in a nurturing and nourishing way – skills the singer has developed over the two decades since her summer as a fellow. 

Cooke will also demonstrate her own vocal prowess and presence at Saturday’s season-opening Academy Festival Orchestra concert when she’ll perform Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (“Summer Nights”). 

“It’s a good chunk of music, 30 minutes of these really gorgeous songs that are all about love in one way or another,” she said. “They’re very fun to perform and it will be a special, rewarding experience to sing with the festival’s orchestra fellows.”

Upcoming @ MA

Thursday, June 22: If you missed Mosher guest artist Anthony McGill’s “So a Clarinetist and a Comedian Walk into a Bar” show with Kimberly Clark on Tuesday night, you can still catch the 2020 Avery Fisher Prize-winning New York Philharmonic clarinetist – the first African American principal player in the organization’s history – in a more serious setting. He’ll be coaching the four feverishly ambitious fellows in the only clarinet master class of the summer not taught by the titanically talented faculty member Richie Hawley. (3:30 pm; Hahn Hall; $10)

Friday, June 23:Una Noche en Miraflores, the Academy’s first-ever all Spanish-language vocal program, finds multi-Grammy-winning first generation Cuban-American opera star Ana María Martínez and celebrated pianist César Cañón presenting an immersion into Spanish song, culture, and dance performed by the vocal fellows plus guitarist Andres Vadin flamenco dancing sensation Manuel Gutierrez. (7:30 pm; Hahn Hall; $40)

Saturday, June 24: Binge on Berlioz at tonight’s opening concert by the fellows-powered Academy Festival Orchestra, appropriately conducted by Stéphane Denève, the Music Director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra who has a special affinity for the music of his native France. Denève, who just wrapped up his first year as Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, the prestigious orchestral academy founded by Michael Tilson-Thomas, is the perfect choice to inaugurate the 2023 symphonic season, the Academy’s first since the death of longtime first-concert conductor Larry Rachleff last August. Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke (see interview above) stars in the opening Les nuits d’été (“Summer Nights”), Berlioz’s setting of six poems by Théophile Gautier, before the ensemble takes on the composer’s Symphonie fantastique – which Leonard Bernstein termed the first musical expedition into psychedelia, in any case it certainly explores the extremities of the emotional spectrum. (7:30 pm; Granada Theatre; $55)… Dive in with Denève at the optional nearby pre-concert Meet-the-Conductor event where he’ll share stories about the works and welcome questions while patrons sip wine or beer and enjoy light snacks. (6-7 pm; Sullivan Goss, 11 E. Anapamu St.; $25)

Tuesday, June 27: Just how spoiled are we to have Jeremy Denk – the pianist who just about a decade ago had a year that saw him awarded a MacArthur (“Genius”) Fellowship, an Avery Fisher Prize, and Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year before he served as Music Director of the Ojai Festival in 2014 – here at the Music Academy as a regular faculty artist? Fortunately, we haven’t yet started taking him for granted, given the immediate standing ovation that greeted Denk and fellow faculty pianist Conor Hanick at the conclusion of the pair’s peerless performance of Adams’ Hallelujah Junction at the tribute concert to Jorja Fleezanis last weekend. Tonight, the irrepressible Denk delivers his take on Bach’s Six Partitas back at a sold-out Hahn Hall, proving that, as the New York Times wrote, he is a pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs. (7:30 pm; Hahn Hall; $55)

Wednesday, June 28: The Summer’s first Chamber Nights “Up Close & Personal” event find a varied program performed by the fellows who have been carefully coaxed by a team of faculty artists in Lehmann Hall, the institute’s on-campus version of the elegant salons that hosted such evenings in days of yore. After a wine reception, the dozen instrumentalists plus a vocalist will play Tilson-Thomas’ “Street Song for Brass Quintet,” Mozart’s “Per questa bella mano”aria for bass-baritone, double bass, and piano, and Brahms’ “String Quintet No. 2 in G major, Op. 111.” (7:30 pm; Lehmann Hall; $45)

Thursday, June 29: Today’s programming is fit to be Tai’d. As in Tai Murray,the visiting violinist who will conduct a master class (1:30 pm; Lehmann Hall; $10) before performing two pieces forthe Academy’s second salvo in its X2 – “Apprentice meets Legend” – series that mashes up fellows and faculty on each work. Murray, who won an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2004 and was a member of Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society II in 2004-2006, joins colleagues for both Joan Tower’s “Petroushskates”and Debussy’s “Danses sacrée et profane,”before the academy’s trombonist Mark H. Lawrence leads fellows in Enrique Crespo’s “Bruckner Etude for Low Brass,” and Denk and violist Richard O’Neill pair up with two fellows for Brahms’ “Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25.” (7:30 pm; Hahn Hall; $55)