This weekend is like homecoming for mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano.
The New York singer, a regular on the Metropolitan Opera stage and an in-demand guest with some of the country’s top orchestras, slips into Tucson a couple of times a year with her native Tucsonan husband, pianist Christopher Cano.
But this trip will be filled with new discoveries, including her debut with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra doing works she has never performed with an orchestra. She also will be part of the orchestra’s first-ever performance of Berlioz’s choral masterpiece “The Damnation of Faust.” Cano joins tenor William Burden and bass-baritone Jordan Bisch for performances next weekend in what the orchestra is billing as the first time the work has ever been performed here professionally.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun for the orchestra and everyone involved,” Cano said last week in a phone interview from her New York home.
Cano is pulling double-duty with the TSO. Friday she will perform the first of three MasterWorks concerts with the orchestra, singing Berlioz’s “Les nuits d’été” and Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé — two pieces she has never before performed with an orchestra.
Next weekend she reunites with Burden and Bisch, with whom she has performed before, for “Faust,” a piece she describes as a heavy-hitting tragedy that might not fit in with some people’s romantic notions of Valentine’s Day.
“It’s actually quite tragic,” she said. “But … it has a little bit of everything. Marguerite and Faust have the love story and the betrayal. And you have Marguerite going from a rather naive and innocent place to (being) an abandoned woman in a very tragic situation.
“And then you have Faust on this massive journey of not knowing what he wants,” added the 29-year-old St. Louis native.
Of course, there’s the devil himself Méphistophélès, who Cano said is evil but just charming enough to make him likable.
The TSO Chorus, meanwhile, fills in all the other characters, including the villagers and townspeople.
“You have throughout all of the evening sort of demonic music. You have sort of a country-style folk music when the chorus represents the village and the people of the town. And really you have a strange and dysfunctional relationship throughout the evening that makes for a varied night,” she explained. “But the ultimate end it is more of a tragic story than anything else.”
Cano was last here in September when she and Christopher Cano performed a recital at his alma mater, the University of Arizona. The performance was a run-up to the couple’s concert at Carnegie Hall in October and a chance to perform for Cano’s family and friends who couldn’t make the trip to New York.
On this trip, the couple, who have been married just over three years, will get to spend two weeks in Tucson, enough time to catch up with family and friends and spend time in the kitchen of Cano’s mother-in-law, learning her culinary secrets.
“Although I enjoy all of the restaurants, I must eat my mother-in-law’s cooking,” she said with a giggle. “We’re going to be there for two weeks, so that means I get to eat a lot and learn a lot … about how she makes things so that when Chris gets a little homesick we can go to the store and buy some stuff and make something with a little more taste of home.”
