Fall Arts Preview | Adventuress with Depth and an Ear on Varied Horizons

Adventuress with Depth
and an Ear on
Varied Horizons

Uniquely Gifted and Much-Acclaimed Soprano
Julia Bullock Returns to the 805 this Season,
Twice and in Early to Modern Musical Form

By Josef Woodard | September 26, 2024

Read more of our 2024 Fall Arts Preview cover story here.

Although she may not register as highly on the “household name index” as other artists passing through Santa Barbara this season, Julia Bullock is one of the more artistically significant figures coming to Santa Barbara in the fall. The widely and rightfully acclaimed soprano, whose résumé includes work with John Adams and other important composers, early music, and an adventurous, welcoming approach to new work — including by Black composers — graces Santa Barbara stages twice this season, in radically different idiomatic garb.

On Friday, October 4, at Campbell Hall, Bullock will perform HARAWI, the late, great French composer Olivier Messiaen’s complex, radiant, and criminally underperformed song cycle. The piece, drawing influence from Andean culture and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, would have been a highlight of the 2022 Ojai Music Festival, but Bullock was kept away by COVID. The Ojai Festival teamed up with AMOC (American Modern Opera Company, which presided over the ill-fated Ojai fest) and UCSB Arts & Lectures to finally realize the project, which also features pianist Conor Hanick, dancer/choreographers Or Schraiber and Bobbi Jene Smith, and Zack Winokur as director.

Shifting eras and perspectives, as Bullock has shown herself adept at doing, we move from Messiaen’s 1945 opus to the realm of 18th-century Baroque music, when she again appears in town (Jan. 21, 2025, at the Lobero Theatre) as a soloist with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

This season’s doubled-up Bullock appearances continue a relationship with our region that began with a memorable recital at Hahn Hall in 2018, after a dynamic Ojai Music Festival showcase.

An American musical heroine in progress, Bullock lives in Munich with her husband, pianist Christian Reif, and their baby son. We checked in with Bullock in advance of her eagerly awaited Messiaen venture out west.

You made a very strong impression with your recital debut in Santa Barbara, back in 2018 — after a dynamic layered role in the Ojai Music Festival, singing Kaija Saariaho, Tyshawn Sorey, and more. It has been a strange stretch of years since then, through COVID and the rebuilding of culture — including the classical music realm. Can you look back over the recent period of years with a certain perspective, and does this now feel like a reenergized and refocused creative time for you?

To be honest, I’m just trying to make it through some days… Ha. The reality of gathering my energy and focus has shifted to something more concentrated and precise since becoming a parent. The times for rest are real, and necessary.

I have always been selective with how I spend my resources — in every respect — but I’ve become more discerning about each decision since the height of the pandemic, and certainly since giving birth, and choosing to be on the road with my child every step of the way, because I can’t imagine it any differently. Life is precious. I want to live each moment fully and enjoy it.

I was very happy to see HARAWI coming to Santa Barbara. Can you tell me about your process of connecting with Messiaen’s masterful and rarely heard work, and has your relationship with it deepened as you spend more time with it?

After listening to some of Messiaen’s music sung by friends while at a summer program maybe 15 years ago, I was shaken to the core and went on a deep dive into his vocal writing. There is not a lot, but it’s dense. And Messiaen is one of those composers I felt connected to immediately.

I programmed a fair amount of Messiaen’s work by creating my own “song sets” on recital programs, in part because I just wanted to share this intense material in a context where I felt able to deliver, but in truth I never performed a full cycle of Messiaen’s music/poetry — until HARAWI — because I didn’t feel capable of harnessing the required skill sets to make that material soar.

I understood the furious quality’ I understood the vulnerable qualities’ I could grasp the divine spiritual aspects and the sensual unfurlings, but it took me some years to balance the courage needed and organized technique required to lay it out without being in overdrive, particularly with his songs so cosmic in scale and content. And honestly, I’m glad I didn’t/couldn’t rush that process. It took me over five years to find the team with which to partner.

If you listen to most recordings of Messiaen’s vocal music, or watch videos online, there’s always a raw intensity, which sometimes comes across as fury or anger, or even a bit scary, but the open, flowing sensuality and gentle caress of the material is often overlooked, or at least not articulated with a sweeping sense of ease.

It took some years and practice in performance to decide that those extremes of expression — from screaming to cooing, crying to laughing — have a rightful place in my human utterances as a singer trained in bel canto technique — and using breath to really guide the way. I don’t always strike that balance right, but with Messiaen, he asks for it all. Particularly in this cycle, HARAWI. And damn, it feels amazing to be called to do it, and organized enough to meet the demands while still maintaining myself.

We grow up in societies where often we are told to withdraw and withhold. So how wonderful to be asked — by composers like Messiaen — to do the exact opposite. But one genuinely has to exercise the extremes of expression in public to the degree where you don’t fear to shed your veils and masks, and feel able to share without hesitation.

At the time when I started listening to Messiaen’s HARAWI, I was — sadly — completely ignorant to the existing, rich practice of Harawi (yarawi/qarawi) in Andean traditions. I didn’t know that some of Messiaen’s melodies, and even some of his poetry was essentially quoted from an anthropological/musicology book that he came across. But this cycle by Messiaen encouraged me to research this music and dance practice, in a rudimentary way at the start. It led me to make the decision that I wanted the element of sound to be matched by movement if/when I performed the cycle, and also led to me to have conversations with living practitioners of HARAWI BEFORE heading into any sort of staging or even official learning of the work.

HARAWI has connections to Tristian und Isolde and Andean traditions, and is an unconventional song cycle. Where do you see it fitting in the context of 20th-century art song? Does it present particular challenges on your part?

What’s great about this cycle is that it crosses borders of time, space, location, culture, and the development and deconstruction of language as a tool to connect and understand the depths of grief and love. The cycle closes with an extended statement that embraces the fullness of sadness and loss, alongside the fullness of joy and love.

There’s space for it all to be processed and honored, when not suppressed, or siphoned off, or gripped too tightly. The flood of feeling is welcome. The flood of multidimensional experiences is welcome.

And this performance/production features Conor Hanick, who we in Santa Barbara know well from his role at the Music Academy of the West, choreography and other expansions on the original format. Can you tell us what’s in store with the AMOC production, and the concept behind that?

Shadows. Illuminating elements. One bench. Four human beings. Words. Movement. Sound. Dance. Stillness.

It took time to get this team together, but once I met these individuals, I knew what needed to be done in order to get this cycle on its feet for people to receive, even only after one listening.

What fully grounded/or unlocked the overarching 12 songs for us as a team, and what ended up guiding the direction of the drama, was the fact that at the time Messiaen chose to write these songs, his wife was suffering from a degenerative mental disease; all while a new love partner was entering his life. Both of these women were musicians and inspirations for him. When I found out that the new love interest only dared play this song cycle HARAWI once the ill wife passed after years of sickness, and she was married to Messiaen, the decision to embody the work in this way was no longer a question.

This is an interesting and revealing season at UCSB’s Arts & Lectures, in that your links to both contemporary (and modernist) music and to early music — with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment — are given spotlights. Is that, in a sense, an ideal dualistic spotlight through which to get a feeling for the breadth — or at least part of your breadth — as an artist and music lover?

These two opportunities presented themselves in the same season sort of by chance, I think. (Which is the case with how a lot of my life in music has unfolded.) It’s brilliant that I’ll have a chance to share a major work that I’ve loved for years with those present in the audience, and it’s brilliant that I’ll also have a chance to share some of the arias that moved me to tears while first studying classical western-European music. It’s a treat and challenge for me, if I dare admit being that indulgent.

But I also thoroughly enjoy singing recitals with 25 some songs streamed together, simply paired alongside a pianist, sharing text and music in the most direct and immediate way possible.

And I see from your upcoming schedule a ripe menu of new and old, from Handel’s Theodora to John Adams’s El Niño (which you sang in your Met debut last spring) and Jessie Montgomery’s Freedom Songs, with the Baltimore Symphony early next year. Is that kind of diverse schedule your idea of a good time, so to speak, in terms of contrasts and shifting perspectives?

Bringing the chamber version of El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered to parts of Europe and back to N.Y.C. with people I cherish is now a treasured tradition, and one I hope to uphold each year of my singing life. I do this instead of Handel’s Messiah.

Sharing the vast and kaleidoscopic scope of Cleopatra’s character in John’s newest opera, Antony and Cleopatra, was just thrilling the first time in Barcelona, and I can’t wait to revisit her with my colleagues at The Met this season. She might now be, to date, the role I’ve most enjoyed singing above any other onstage.

And yes, each project, diverse in palette, contrasting in tone, temperament, content, and vocal demands not only holds my interest, but also demands conscious attention.

I didn’t go into music for a means to escape. There’s nothing really casual about my relationship to music or other art forms — and thankfully, most music asks us to actively engage, shift perspectives, and not firmly grip onto any one way of thinking or being. So, I guess what appears to be more extreme shifts in my schedule, when it comes to repertoire, has become almost mandatory (and “a good time”), as that’s a reality with which I want to contend, and we all must.

But, looking at it more broadly, it’s just music and words by human beings working through various preoccupations. I view it as simple — and complicated — as that.

Speaking of Jessie Montgomery, she is one of many Black composers who have gained more attention and nurturing than previously. You are wel- established by now in your career. Are you encouraged by the slow but (hopefully) steady increase of racial and gender inclusiveness in the classical music world in recent years?

Of course, shifts to more open/accepting mindsets are always lovely elements to celebrate and further encourage. However, I do find the pressure placed on individuals to buy into becoming “the next great B/black or female” whatever quite tiresome. It’s tiresome to read about; it’s tiresome to think about; it’s always been tired.

Representation is unquestionably important, but most B/black and female-identifying artists I know are just trying to support themselves, share their work while staying dedicated to their development, and keep going for as long as we feel inspired and/or able.

The mystique of being an artist celebrated by a supremacist, patriarchal, misogynistic culture that is now aiming to be inclusive, because it was exclusively aiming so far in the other direction for so long, may be welcome by some. But there are many places and people with whom to make and share art. The attempt to feel included and recognized by such a culture, is becoming, for me at least, a moot and tired topic.

Congratulations on your Grammy Award, for Walking in the Dark, a project with your partner, Christian Reif. It’s a beautiful and unique album, ending with a poignant version of Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” and touching on some internalized themes of a world in darkness. Was that a cathartic project for you, and what’s next on your personal discographic ventures?

It was, and I hope every artist feels they are given the opportunity to carefully select the material they want to lay down. Nonesuch has always had an extraordinary vision, and I’m grateful we found each other at this moment in time when things were confounding. There are maaaany ideas … having a bit of trouble deciding which direction to go at present. However, I foresee Kurt Weill, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Odetta, and maybe some more Connie Converse or the writer/composer Laura Mvula on the horizon. But not much to publicize yet.

Are there new projects or grand visions you are excited about pursuing? Are you happy with the way things have worked out for you, at this juncture?

There’s some orchestral music and opera roles I’d like to pursue for my own learning pleasure, but everything will come in due time and place. No longer finding myself in such a furious rush toward much of anything anymore. Although I may still harbor some characteristics of being ambitious, right now I’m just trying to live peacefully with my loved ones.

I’ll know when it’s time to put my foot on the accelerator again.