Sasha Cooke
Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke has sung a wide variety of operatic and concert works ranging from the Baroque to the contemporary. She has sung with most of the major American symphony orchestras and with several important ones beyond.
Cooke was born in 1983 in Riverside, California, but grew up in College Station, Texas, where both her parents taught at Texas A&M University. Cooke started piano lessons at four and immediately gravitated toward music, joining a choir and taking up the viola. As a high school student, she was encouraged to consider a piano career. However, after graduating from College Station's Consolidated High School in 2000, she attended Rice University and majored in voice. Her graduate studies in voice were at the Juilliard School in New York. She went on for further study at the Marlboro Music Festival, the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, as well as the Seattle Opera and Central City Opera's Young Artist Training Programs, among others. A major early performance came with the Milwaukee Symphony in Leonard Bernstein's Symphony No. 1 ("Jeremiah") during the 2009-2010 season, the debut year there of conductor Edo de Waart. In 2012, she made her recording debut on the Yarlung label with the orchestral song recital If You Love for Beauty with the Colburn Orchestra.
Since then, Cooke has been heard with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, and most of the other top American orchestras. Her recitals have taken her to Kennedy Center in Washington, Carnegie Hall, and London's Wigmore Hall. Cooke has been a favorite attraction at summer festivals and outdoor venues; at the Hollywood Bowl in 2012, she sang Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Leonard Slatkin. One of her first operatic appearances came in Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with the San Francisco Opera in 2015. She has sung several different roles in Handel's Orlando but has also gravitated toward contemporary opera; for the summer 2020 season, she was signed to perform the role of Laurene Powell Jobs in Mason Bates' opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. Cooke has recorded for Sono Luminus, Naxos, and PentaTone Classics, and she appeared on Volume 4 of the Hyperion label's edition of Liszt's complete songs. In 2022, Cooke released the song recital how do i find you on PentaTone; she was accompanied by pianist Kirill Kuzmin.
© James Manheim /TiVo
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Discography
10 album(s) • Sorted by Bestseller
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Mahler: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor "Resurrection"
Ruby Hughes, Sasha Cooke, Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä
Classical - Released by BIS on 1 Feb 2019
Available in24-Bit/96 kHz Stereo -
Violins of Hope (Live)
Chamber Music - Released by PENTATONE on 22 Jan 2021
Available in24-Bit/96 kHz Stereo -
Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 4
Classical - Released by Hyperion on 29 Apr 2016
Available in24-Bit/96 kHz Stereo -
If You Love for Beauty
Sasha Cooke, Colburn Orchestra, Yehuda Gilad
Classical - Released by Yarlung Records on 4 Sep 2012
Available in24-Bit/88 kHz Stereo -
how do I find you
Mélodies - Released by PENTATONE on 22 Jan 2022
Available in24-Bit/192 kHz Stereo -
Sasha Cooke Live
Classical - Released by Music@Menlo LIVE on 12 Apr 2018
Available in16-Bit/44.1 kHz Stereo -
Schubert Interrupted
Chamber Music - Released by Longhorn Music on 16 Jul 2015
Available in16-Bit/44.1 kHz Stereo -
Love Sublime
Sasha Cooke, Steven Blier, New York Festival Of Song
Classical - Released by NYFOS Records on 22 Jul 2022
Available in24-Bit/48 kHz Stereo -
Harbison Symphonies 5 & 6
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Sasha Cooke, Gerald Finley
Classical - Released by BSO Classics on 9 Jul 2013
Available in24-Bit/88 kHz Stereo -
Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 4
Classical - Released by Hyperion on 29 Apr 2016
Available in16-Bit/44.1 kHz Stereo