Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke can just imagine what will be going through the minds of some in the audience at this weekend’s Tucson Symphony Orchestra concert.
They will no doubt think that she and her husband, bass-baritone Kelly Markgraf, are experiencing marital hiccups when they take the stage to sing Leonard Bernstein’s “Trouble in Tahiti.”
“I think it’s inevitable,” she said, reached in Amsterdam Sunday morning hours after she finished performing Bernstein’s Symphony No. 1 “Jeremiah” with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. “I can already imagine this being very powerful and in a way almost therapeutic for our relationship. The thing about art, it opens our mind, it opens our heart to experiences and emotions and we share those with each other.”
The couple’s marriage is solid, she said, a far cry from the couple in Bernstein’s “Tahiti.” The composer based the piece on his parents’ deteriorating relationship in the 1950s, a time when divorce was something people just didn’t do. “Tahiti,” a one-act opera, exposes the gut punch of love leaving a marriage.
“It’s a fabulous piece,” said Cooke, who will perform her first “Tahiti” with the orchestra, which also has never done the piece before. “It’s just very moving. I think for anybody, in a marriage or not in a marriage, in any kind of relationship, you can’t help but find it very moving because we all struggle and have moments where things possibly may not succeed anymore. This is a world in marriage that is very sad.”
Cooke said performing “Tahiti” opposite her husband, who has done the piece before, will be kind of therapeutic. It might have a similar impact on the audience, she added.
“For our relationship or any relationship to witness that it’s a little bit of a wake-up call to just appreciate one another and treat each other better and do your best,” she said.
Bernstein’s one-act opera is filled with wonderful Bernstein music that straddles the divide of music theater, classical and jazz. Songs pack a powerful emotional punch.
“It’s beautiful music. I think Bernstein is an incredible composer,” said Cooke, the mother of two young girls. “He’s also very unique; there is no one really like Bernstein, which I think is one of the reasons he wasn’t fully embraced as a composer or as a classical composer. People wanted to stick him into the musical theater category and then not really take him seriously. But his music is incredible and it goes straight to your heart.”
The performance, which repeats three times this weekend under the baton of TSO music director José Luis Gomez and features the University of Arizona Jazz Trio, rounds out the final weekend of the Tucson Desert Song Festival’s “Bernstein At 100.”
