Sasha Cooke Poeme de l'Amour et de la Mer 180g 45rpm LP

Tracking Angle Rated 9/10 Music, 9/10 Sonics!

Executive Producer: Jim Mulally

Opera News heralded mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke's debut album on Yarlung Records and described her onstage "attractive, erotic stage presence." Writing in Opera News specifically about this recording Eric Myers continues "Chausson's heartfelt Poème de l'Amour et de la Mer is a magnificently over-the-top work, one that can be hugely effective when performed by a singer of Cooke's intelligence and restraint. ... her voice rides beautifully atop Chausson's churning Symbolist score." The New Zealand Herald describes Sasha's voice as "bewitchingly lustrous."

Sasha's concert and opera schedule takes her all over the world. Sasha won her first GRAMMY® Award for Sony's DVD release of Doctor Atomic from The Met and her second GRAMMY for The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs at Santa Fe Opera. In addition to her performances in the major concert halls and opera houses around the world, Sasha performs regularly with The English Concert conducted by Yarlung's Special Advisor Harry Bicket.

To capture the luscious sound of Sasha Cooke and Colburn Orchestra in the wonderful acoustics of Zipper Hall at The Colburn School, Yarlung built out and doubled the size of the stage to accommodate the number of musicians. They chose two coincident Neumann U-47s for 95% of the sound and two AKG C-12s for a small amount of reinforcement for the percussion and winds. They used microphone preamplifiers made for Yarlung by Elliot Midwood. They summed into two tracks as usual, without using a mixing board, and went directly to Agfa-formula 468 tape.

She has a rich and mesmerizing voice, one that endows Chausson's Pome De L'Amour Et De La Mer for voice and orchestra (set to a text by the Symbolist poet Maurice Bouchor) with a haunting and lissome quality. The engineer of this LP, Bob Attiyeh, deserves high marks for carefully balancing the sound of Cooke and the Colburn Orchestra... A confession: I wasn't originally slated to review the Sasha Cooke album. Attiyeh sent what amounted to a musical care package for me by including the Sasha Cooke album along with the Bach recording that I had originally requested. But her singing was so exemplary that I felt obliged to extol it. Now I can't help wondering what other new recordings Yarlung has tucked away. If these LPs are anything to go by, they can't arrive too quickly.