JuliaBullock

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  • Soprano

About Julia

Grammy-winning American classical singer Julia Bullock combines versatile artistry with a probing intellect and commanding stage presence. As well as headlining productions and concerts at preeminent arts institutions around the world, she has held positions as Artist-in-Residence of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Berkeley’s Cal Performances, and the San Francisco Symphony. A prominent voice of social consciousness and activism, she is “a singer of enveloping tone, startlingly mature presence and unusually sophisticated insight into culture, society and history” (The New York Times).

Bullock’s operatic career spansrepertoire from the Baroque canon to contemporary works written expressly for her voice. This season, she returns to London’s Royal Opera House as Pamina in David McVicar’s production of The Magic Flute. In concert, she premieres Matthew Aucoin’s Song of the Reappeared with the commissioning Chicago Symphony Orchestra and sings La Voix humaine with Sweden’s Gävle Symphony. She premieres a new Tania León commission on a U.S. solo recital tour; reprises two signature projects at Australia’s Adelaide Festival; and curates the Cincinnati Symphony’s May Festival. Recent operatic highlights include headlining John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra and El Niño at the Metropolitan Opera, and creating important new roles in Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Michel van der Aa’s Upload, and Adams’s Girls of the Golden West. In concert, Bullock has performed with ensembles including the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics; the Baltimore, Boston, London, NHK, and San Francisco Symphonies; the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Past solo highlights include tours with the American Modern Opera Company, of which she is a founding core member; the American, British, Belgian, and Russian premieres of Zauberland; and recitals at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles’s Disney Hall, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, Boston’s Celebrity Series, Washington’s Kennedy Center, and London’s Wigmore Hall.

Bullock has developed and launched three signature projects, all flourishing nationally and beyond. Her multimedia ensemble program “History’s Persistent Voice” addresses the transatlantic slave trade through songs by people enslaved in the U.S. and through visual art, poetry, and new music by B/black female composers. Devised with her husband, Christian Reif, El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered is a chamber orchestral arrangement of El Niño that amplifies the voices of women and Latin American poets. Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, created with Tyshawn Sorey, Claudia Rankine, Michael Schumacher, and Peter Sellars, reexamines the life and legacy of Joséphine Baker. Recorded with Reif and the Philharmonia Orchestra for Nonesuch, Bullock’s solo album debut, Walking in the Dark, wonthe 2024 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal, as well as Opus Klassik and Edison Klassiek awards. Her discography also includes Grammy-nominated recordings of Doctor Atomic and West Side Story, while other honors include the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, and First Prize at the Naumburg International Vocal Competition.

Julia is based in Munich, Germany

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Contact

For availability and general enquiries:

Joel Thomas

Joel Thomas

Director
Mathieu Levan

Mathieu Levan

Assistant Artist Manager

Representation

Worldwide general management with Askonas Holt

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Selected Repertoire

Mahler

Symphony No. 4

Julia Bullock singing and Bobbi Jene Smith dancing in the background
Julia standing in the mid distance looking into the camera wearing a grey top and black trousers

Projects

Julia Bullock & AMOC Harawi

The American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) is thrilled to present a new staging of Harawi, Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting, hour-long song cycle for soprano and piano. Messiaen’s musical explorations of love and death will take on a newly physicalised and theatrical dimension through the choreographic work of Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber direction by Zack Winokur and with lighting design by John Torres.

Learn about this project
  • Julia Bullock singing and Bobbi Jene Smith dancing in the background

    Projects

    Julia Bullock & AMOC Harawi

    The American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) is thrilled to present a new staging of Harawi, Olivier Messiaen’s deeply affecting, hour-long song cycle for soprano and piano. Messiaen’s musical explorations of love and death will take on a newly physicalised and theatrical dimension through the choreographic work of Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber direction by Zack Winokur and with lighting design by John Torres.

    Learn about this project
  • Julia standing in the mid distance looking into the camera wearing a grey top and black trousers

    Projects

    Julia Bullock: History's Persistent Voice

    History’s Persistent Voice is Julia's Bullock mixed-media performance piece, bringing together the experiences, words and music of Black American artists. In this collaborative project, with each new city in which it is performed, a new commission by a local composer is added to the programme. The performance is then accompanied by video installations designed by visual artist Hana S. Kim alongside readings from Black American poets and writers.

    Learn about this project

News

Press

  • Anthony & Cleopatra

    Liceu Barcelona
    Oct 2023

    • Y es en la fragilidad de los personajes donde afloran los momentos más emocionantes gracias a la íntima conexión de texto y música que el barítono Gerald Finley y la soprano Julia Bullock aprovechan para mostrar un amplio abanico de matices y colores vocales. Ha tenido suerte el Liceu con Bullock; Adams escribió el papel de Cleopatra específicamente para esta gran cantante y actriz, pero no pudo asumirlo en el estreno en San Francisco por su reciente maternidad, así que lo ha interpretado por primera vez en el coliseo de la Rambla y, la verdad, es un grandísimo papel, agotador y exigente, que culmina con un último encuentro con su amante y una escena del suicidio de gran impacto. [TRANSLATED] it is in the fragility of the characters where the most exciting moments emerge thanks to the intimate connection of text and music that the baritone Gerald Finley and the soprano Julia Bullock take advantage of to show a wide range of nuances and vocal colors. The Liceu has been lucky with Bullock; Adams wrote the role of Cleopatra specifically for this great singer and actress, but she could not take it on at the premiere in San Francisco due to her recent motherhood, so she performed it for the first time at the Rambla Coliseum and, the truth is, it is a great role, exhausting and demanding, which culminates with a last meeting with his lover and a suicide scene of great impact.

    • Attribuons en définitive le relatif succès de la soirée à la qualité des voix. Julia Bullock interprète Cleopatra avec conviction et franchise. Sauf au cours de la scène d’amour, au début de la pièce, et des dialogues avec ses servantes, elle obscurcit sa voix, donnant ainsi la distance nécessaire entre une reine et le monde extérieur. [TRANSLATED] Ultimately, we attribute the relative success of the evening to the quality of the voices. Julia Bullock plays Cleopatra with conviction and frankness. Except during the love scene, at the beginning of the play, and the dialogues with her servants, she obscures her voice, thus giving the necessary distance between a queen and the outside world.

    • Adams avait écrit le rôle de Cléopâtre en pensant à Julia Bullock, dont la maternité ne lui permit pas de participer à la création à San Francisco. Elle a dû donc arriver à Barcelone pour marquer le rôle de son enivrante personnalité. Sa voix possède toute la volupté que l’on pourrait imaginer pour un personnage aussi légendaire, sa figure est également idéale pour le rôle et son jeu fait preuve d’une aisance corporelle sans bornes. [TRANSLATED] Adams had written the role of Cleopatra with Julia Bullock in mind, but she was unable to take part in the San Francisco premiere due to maternity leave. So she had to come to Barcelona to stamp her intoxicating personality on the role. Her voice has all the voluptuousness one could imagine for such a legendary character, her figure is equally ideal for the role and her acting displays boundless physical ease.

  • Recital

    Edinburgh International Festival
    Aug 2023

    • Julia Bullock sang a really impressive Pamina in last weekend’s The Magic Flute at the Edinburgh International Festival, and this Queen’s Hall recital showcased a very different side of her performing life. Her Pamina stood out because hers is a more luxurious voice than that role normally receives, and that was on show in this concert, in beautifully articulated lieder by Schubert and Wolf where every word was carefully considered, and both piano and voice interacted to point up the emotion of the text as well as the music. Bullock’s voice has a rich, smoky texture, seemingly most comfortable in the middle of its range, with occasional bursts of light at the top. Those high passages could be a little approximate in places, but you can forgive a singer a lot when they are singing at 11am! Any such issues had disappeared by the time of her intelligent selection of Italian songs by Rossini and Berio, chosen for no other reason than that they sounded good together. That lower register became even more essential for the second half of her concert, a series of twentieth-century songs by Black American women. There was a strong sense that Bullock was trying to speak for and with those women, not all of whom were recognised in their own lifetimes, and there is something wonderful about seeing an artist who identifies so passionately with their repertoire. It draws performances of deep conviction from them, as here with Bullock, nowhere more powerfully than in Nina Simone’s Four Women, songs about four women who had suffered some sort of oppression and whose sunny names did not reflect the darkness of their lives.

  • Theodora

    Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
    Nov 2023

    • Julia Bullock nous enchante plus tard avec la justesse de son chant – dans enchanter il y a chant en français, c’est donc une belle langue –, son cristal exact dans tous ses énoncés, sa mesure aussi qui n’hésite pas à livrer pourtant en cascade les rivières de notes impérieuses que la partition de Haendel lui prescrit. [TRANSLATED] Julia Bullock enchants us later with the accuracy of her singing – in enchanter there is singing in French, it is therefore a beautiful language –, her exact crystal in all her utterances, her measure too which does not hesitate to deliver nevertheless cascading the rivers of imperious notes that Handel's score prescribes.

    • Julia Bullock la interpreta con voz fresca y incisiva proyección de fraseo. [TRANSLATED] Julia Bullock plays her with a fresh voice and incisive phrasing projection

    • Julia Bullock’s patient strength and unshowy sincerity seemed to me just the ticket for Theodora. Charles Burney described her predecessor, Giulia Frasi, a few years earlier as having for Handel ‘a clear and sweet voice, free from defects, and a smooth and chaste style of singing; which, though cold and unimpassioned, pleased natural ears, and escaped the censure of critics.’ Doubtless that meant something different then from what it would now, but I sensed, however fancifully, a dialogue between our two Theodoras, in the broader spirit of what we saw and heard elsewhere too.

Discography