5 WATCH: Bay Area fans have another chance to see soprano Julia Bullock.
Soprano will present a wide-ranging program in Cal Performances recital
For Julia Bullock, music and social consciousness have always gone hand in hand.
Throughout her career, the acclaimed American soprano has blazed a trail for inclusion. A keen advocate for works by women and composers of color, her performances have expanded the boundaries of what classical music can be.
From her first Bay Area appearances, which included a 2016 performance of “Perle Noire,” a tribute to jazz icon Josephine Baker composed by Tyshawn Sorey and presented as part of Cal Performances’ Ojai at Berkeley series, Bullock has brought expressive, luxuriant sound and a keen understanding of texts to each performance. Today, she continues to champion music too seldom heard during our turbulent times.
This week, Bullock appears in recital with another program of music close to her heart.
Presented as part of the Cal Performances at Home series, and accompanied by pianist Laura Poe, the wide-ranging program includes 20th-century works by African American composers William Grant Still and Margaret Bonds, along with music by John Adams, Kurt Weill, Hugo Wolf, Richard Rodgers and Robert Schumann.
The program, which will be available for three months after its premiere, concludes Cal Performances’ fall 2020 streaming series; a 2021 spring series was announced this week. (See story on Page 6.)
In a phone call from her home in Munich, Germany, where she lives with her husband, former San Francisco Symphony resident conductor Christian Reif, Bullock said she’s delighted to introduce audiences to Still and Bonds.
“I’m so excited to share this material,” she said. “Still and Bonds were two of the most published Black composers of the mid-20th century.”
Bonds, she says, had a particularly fascinating career — one that spanned spirituals to musical theater — and a close working relationship with Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.
“She wrote so much song literature, and a lot of it hasn’t even been published yet,” notes Bullock, who will sing two Bonds settings of Hughes’ poetry: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and the brief but enchanting “Winter Moon,” along with Still’s setting of Hughes’ “The Breath of a Rose.”
Recorded over a single day last month at Germany’s Konzerthaus Blaibach, the recital is “a hybrid between a livestream and an album,” said Bullock, adding that she’s still reviewing the production and putting some finishing touches on it.
Yet for Bullock, getting acquainted with the music of Still and Bonds was pure pleasure.
“I’ve been so impressed by the scope of this material, and how it supports the poetry,” she said. “Whenever I find gems like these, I always try to find opportunities to place them in a context where they can resound loudly.”
The rest of the program is representative of Bullock’s questing spirit. Another featured work is “Three Women: Josefa, Ah Sing, and Dame Shirley,” a suite from John Adams’ Gold Rush opera, “Girls of the Golden West.” Bullock starred in the opera’s 2017 world premiere at San Francisco Opera, singing the central role based on Louise Clappe, the real-life pioneer woman who wrote under the pen name of Dame Shirley.
More recently, Bullock has been a featured artist at the San Francisco Symphony. She’s one of eight “collaborative partners” in an artistic dream team named by music director Esa-Pekka Salonen to help shape the symphony’s future seasons. Last February, she joined Salonen and the orchestra in thrilling performances of song cycles by Britten and Ravel, and she returned as a featured artist in the San Francisco Symphony’s November performance of Nico Muhly’s “Throughline.” The hourlong piece was the symphony’s first streamed event, and Bullock’s performance emerged as the work’s radiant centerpiece.
Today, she says the event was just the beginning of what’s possible for the group’s creative partnership.
“I’m really excited about it,” said Bullock, who is also at work on an upcoming SoundBox program for the symphony. “The collaborations that are beginning to happen are very, very cool. I’m really looking forward to the coming year: what the next step might be, what technologies are available, what else might be possible.”