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Julia Bullock might be best known as an opera singer, but the soprano has tried to balance her stage work each season with equivalent portions of orchestral concerts and vocal recitals. ‘
She has attempted to find a similar balance when it comes to her repertoire, with a range that stretches from Henry Purcell to Robert Schumann to contemporary creators such as Jessie Montgomery and Tania León.
“In recent years, I’ve been describing myself to myself as a classical singer and not thinking so much about what kind of voice type to tag on to myself,“ she said. ”The reason I say ‘classical singer’ is because I’m just looking for classics to sing, regardless of assigned genre.”
Bullock, 39, a St. Louis native, will make her Chicago Symphony Orchestra subscription debut during a Dec. 4-7 set of concerts with guest conductor Petr Popelka. (She previously had performed with the CSO at Ravinia.) “Any time I have a chance to sing in the Midwest, I cherish it very much,” she said.
She will be the soloist in the world premiere of a CSO-commissioned song cycle titled Song of the Reappeared. The 22-minute work was composed by Matthew Aucoin, who received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2018. He has written three operas, including Eurydice (2020), which was co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera, where he was artist-in-residence in 2016-20, and New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Bullock and Aucoin studied at the Juilliard School around the same time, and the two are friends. The soprano is a founding member of the adventurous American Modern Opera Company, which Aucoin and director and choreographer Zach Winokur founded in 2017. She has performed a few of the composer’s pieces, but this is the first song cycle that Aucoin has written for her.
“One of the most exciting elements of this work are the parts he has written for the orchestra,” Bullock said. “It has such tremendous rhythm and a lushness. I don’t know all of Matt’s work, but it does feel like there is an opening in Matt’s writing in this piece for the orchestra in particular. And that part I find I really exciting.”
The songs are settings of texts by Chilean poet Raúl Zurita that deal with his past as a survivor of political imprisonment and torture during the notorious military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1973-1990, covertly supported by the U.S. government. Bullock believes they also have a strong contemporary resonance. “We are living in a time in human history where we as civilians are aware of our government’s actions and also aware of our government’s crimes against a collective humanity and are being made complicit because of it, and many people are trying to find a way to challenge that,” she said. Aucoin is well aware of today’s political climate, and Bullock believes it is bold of him to “memorialize” Zurita’s words through music and have the resulting work be heard for the first time in the United States.
One of the early turning points in Bullock’s career came in 2013-15 when she was still completing her vocal studies. She appeared in multiple performances of visionary director Peter Sellars’ re-imagining of Henry Purcell’s unfinished 1695 opera, The Indian Queen, a co-production of the Teatro Real in Madrid, Perm Opera in Russia and the English National Opera. “Young Soprano Julia Bullock, debuting at the ENO in this production was wonderful, filling her role and song with emotive conviction, full of anguish, longing and sensuality, she brought a vibrancy to the role that convinced from the off,” wrote Eric Page in Scene magazine.
Besides gaining her important notice, the production also began what has been a lasting professional relationship with Sellars; she is sure that through him, she got an audition with famed composer John Adams in 2014 for a New York performance of the composer’s opera-oratorio, El Niño, which ultimately never happened. “But at that ‘audition’ with him, I sang a range of repertoire, and we had a wonderful chat,” she said.
From there, Adams asked her to perform in El Niño elsewhere and to perform on a recording of his opera Dr. Atomic (2005) that he conducted with the BBC Symphony. Bullock went on to become a kind of artistic muse for him. The composer wrote the role of Dame Shirley in his opera, Girls of the Golden West, for Bullock, and she performed it in San Francisco’s world-premiere production in 2017 and again in the European debut at the Dutch National Opera.
Most recently, she starred as Cleopatra in both San Francisco’s 2022 world premiere of Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra, an adaptation of the Shakespearean play, and the Metropolitan Opera presentation in May 2025. Response to the work has been mixed, with Zachary Woolfe’s review in the New York Times carrying the headline: “A New ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ Sags at the Met.”
But Bullock remains undaunted. “I think the piece as a dramatic work was so immensely gratifying to perform,” she said, “and, even though, it had its immense challenges, as all of John’s music does, I just think it’s one of the most exciting roles I’ve taken on, and to date, it is my favorite operatic role to sing.”
Away from the operatic stage, Bullock can boast a host of recent accomplishments as well, including her solo album debut on the Nonesuch label, “Walking in the Dark,” which won the 2024 Grammy Award for best classical solo vocal. Recorded with her husband, conductor and pianist Christian Reif, and the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra, it combines Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with an aria from El Niño and songs by Oscar Brown Jr., Connie Converse, Sandy Denny and Billy Taylor.
Adding yet another dimension to her career, Bullock is serving as director of the 2026 edition of the Cincinnati May Festival, a celebrated series of summer of choral concerts that marked its 150th anniversary in 2023. Famed conductor James Conlon served as the event’s music director from 1979 through 2016, one of the longest tenures in such a position with any American classical institution.
Since 2024, the festival has divided its leadership between a standing director of choruses and a festival director who rotates annually. “I’m embarrassingly admitting that I didn’t know of the May Festival and its 150-year history and its importance in the choral community, but also its importance as a cultural center of Cincinnati,” she said.
Once she did fully grasp the festival’s legacy, she eagerly accepted the group’s invitation to serve as the 2026 director. She started working two years ago on a lineup that begins May 15 with what has been titled An Eclectic Opening Night. The program runs the gamut from Handel and Palestrina to songs by Margaret Bonds (1913-’72), one of the first Black female composers to gain recognition in the United States. Also featured during the festival will be Duke Ellington’s The River and selections from Porgy and Bess. “It’s just been a wonderful collaboration with the May Festival team and the Cincinnati Symphony,” Bullock said.
Reflecting her strong interest in promoting equity and inclusion in the classical-music world, Bullock regularly performs History’s Persistent Voice, a “multimedia ensemble program” that combines historic songs created by enslaved people and contemporary works by Black female composers with visual art and poetry. She originally created the offering in 2018 as part of a residency at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and has continued it, allowing it to evolve as she adds new elements by local musicians and artists in each city where it is presented. “That’s so it doesn’t just feel like these imports who are brought in,” she said. “It’s a celebration of local talent and people who are vested in their community.”
