When cellist Kristina Reiko Cooper, left, moved to Israel from the United States, she found inspiration for her latest CD in her new land.

“Stone and Steel is an album inspired by Israel. It’s based on very old
tunes and very old songs, such as baroque and Renaissance music – even
some Gregorian chants and Elizabethan songs that we’ve interpreted in a
modern esthetic with classical roots,” said Reiko Cooper over the phone
from her home in Tel Aviv.

(with video)

“When I converted and married my husband, [investment banker Leonard Rosen] we could have continued working in New York, but we wanted to live in Israel to get the full Jewish experience. It’s different than converting and staying in New York… In Israel, we are experiencing it full throttle,” she said.

Stone and Steel features Reiko Cooper on her 1786 William Forster cello, with piano and percussion accompaniment. The CD, which includes works by 17th-century composers Henry Purcell and John Dowland, has classical roots. The music, however, has been reworked with contemporary jazz arrangements by Kenji Bunch, who was heralded as “a composer to watch” by the New York Times, and award-winning composer and saxophonist Patrick Zimmerli.

Born into a family of musicians – her father, Rex Cooper, is a pianist and professor at Pacific University in Oregon; her mother, Mutsuko Tatman, is a violinist with the Phoenix Opera and the Tucson Symphony; her grandfather was a composer, and her grandmother was an opera singer – it was natural for her to start playing piano at five. She then learned the violin and flute at 10.

The following year, during her father’s sabbatical in Paris, the cello became the focus of Reiko Cooper’s life.

“We found a cello teacher who was incredible, and I improved so much that my parents wanted me to stay on when my father’s sabbatical ended,” she said.  

When her living arrangements with a Parisian family fell through, Reiko Cooper lived on her own, went to school and continued her music studies in Paris.

“I wouldn’t recommend it to others, but when I was 12, I thought I was much older and more mature. I think I lived on baguettes and Nutella that year,” she said, laughing.

With a doctorate from Juilliard School, Reiko Cooper is a visiting professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and the co-music director of the Israel Chamber Music Society. She plays with the eclectic trio Intersection and the contemporary music group Continuum.

Reiko Cooper has appeared all over the world and played with the Prague Chamber Orchestra, the Osaka Symphony and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, among others.

Reiko Cooper and klezmer clarinettist Giora Feidman will première a double concerto, written for them by Georgian Israeli composer Yosef Bardanashvili, in Israel and New York next season.

Has the country inspired her to play Israeli music? “That’s my next album. I’m already talking to different composers and arrangers. There will be the same grouping – piano and percussion, and maybe we’ll add some ethnic instruments. I run into a lot of fine musicians in Israel,” she said.

Reiko Cooper will perform in Toronto on March 20, in the lobby of the Classical 96.3 building at 550 Queen St. E.  and on March 21 at the Glenn Gould Studio, opening for Quartetto Gelato.

Stone and Steel is available through the Linus Record website, Amazon.ca and iTunes. Reiko Cooper’s website address is www.kristinareikocooper.com.

To hear her sound see the video below: