Julia Bullock News

Juilliard's Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts, under the leadership of artistic director Brian Zeger, announces its 2019-20 season of opera and vocal arts performances. Highlights of the upcoming season include three mainstage operas: Mozart's Così fan tutte, conducted by alumnus Nimrod David Pfeffer and directed by faculty member David Paul, on November 13, 15, and 17, 2019, in Juilliard's Peter Jay Sharp Theater; Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art's MetLiveArts and the New York Philharmonic with Juilliard singers, conducted by Daniela Candillari and directed by Louisa Proske, on February 8, 11, 12, and 14, 2020, in the Charles Engelhard Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Puccini's La bohème, conducted by Keri-Lynn Wilson and directed by Stephen Wadsworth, on April 22, 24, and 26, 2020, in Juilliard's Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones has opened at Opera Theatre St. Louis. It is gorgeous! Deeply intimate and honest, the beautifully told story almost overshadows the music by the great jazz trumpeter Terrence Blanchard.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts today announced its 2019 White Light Festival, which will run October 19 through November 24. For its tenth anniversary season, the multidisciplinary festival will feature events presented in eight venues across the city, including U.S. and New York premieres and the return of festival favorites.

On Thursday, May 16 at 7:00pm at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, three Young Concert Artists soloists make their New York concert debuts with the Orchestra of Luke's conducted by Teddy Abrams.

The University Musical Society (UMS) announces its 141st season, which runs from September 2019 through April 2020. One of the most acclaimed and innovative performing art presenters in the nation and a 2014 recipient of the National Medal of Arts, UMS will continue to showcase time-honored ensembles and artists alongside a diverse lineup of young performers who push the boundaries of their art forms in new directions. In addition to presenting world-class performances, UMS is also committed to creating unique and engaging ways for audiences to connect with the artists on stage through a robust offering of education and community engagement activities.

The International Contemporary Ensemble, 'America's foremost new-music group' (Alex Ross), performs Tyshawn Sorey'sPerle Noire: Meditations for Josephine featuring star soprano Julia Bullock on Friday, May 3, 2019 at 10pm at Oberon, the American Repertory Theater's club venue. Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine honors the brilliance, daring, courage, and tragedies of Josephine Baker in a production conceived by Peter Sellars with original music by Tyshawn Sorey and texts by Claudia Rankine, both MacArthur Fellows.

American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) at Harvard University announces April and May 2019 programming at OBERON, its club theater space for cutting-edge performance and a thriving incubator for local and emerging artists. Upcoming events include A.R.T. Breakout, Live @ OBERON, and Afterglow @ OBERON series, A.R.T. presentations, and independently produced events.

The Cecilia Chorus of New York, Mark Shapiro, Music Director will present Brahms, Elgar and The Brothers Balliett, on May 3 at 8:00 PM at Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage, 57th St. and 7th Ave. in Manhattan.

From the 16th of March to the 9th of April 2019, the Nederlandse Reisopera (Dutch National Touring Opera) will be taking a new production of the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music around the country. This is an English-language version produced by an American artistic team. In this staging, Director Zack Winokur looks back to the film that the musical was originally based on, Ingmar Bergman's Smile of a Summer Night: 'What I found lacking in the musical, at least in the productions that I saw, was the bodily, sensual and erotic comedy which is at the heart of the film. Why are people continually trying to seduce each other and why are they continually failing? This work is about feelings that everyone deals with in daily life, which is comforting, alienating and disquieting at the same time.'

Vocalist Julia Bullock will be the host of opera programming on the new ALL ARTS broadcast channel and streaming platform. Bullock has been hailed by Vanity Fair as “one of opera's fastest-rising stars,” and according to The New York Times, she “has anchored some of the most innovative performances of recent years.”

Music's Biggest Night - the GRAMMYs - is here! Live from STAPLES Center, and hosted by Alicia Keys, the 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards will be broadcast on CBS at 8:00 p.m. ET/5:00 p.m. PT. 

This January, NYC-ARTS will highlight trailblazing women in the arts, all of whom are celebrated for taking risks and bringing their respective crafts to new heights. 

Well, it's that time of the year again--time for a look-back on what was worth making note of during the calendar year that's about to come to an end. It's from a totally personal, subjective point of view, of course, but frankly that's the way opera-lovers always seem to like it, n'est-ce pas? The productions worth noting come from places big, small and in-between, from composers old as the hills to freshly minted or somewhere in between (likewise the performers), from traditional or boldly modern to simply stand up and sing.

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) announces their spring 2019 season concerts. Engagements this spring include performances of Tyshawn Sorey's Perle Noire: Meditations For Josephine featuring rising soprano Julia Bullock at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Miller Theatre Composer Portraits of Wang Lu and Tyshawn Sorey, three performances at the 2019 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, and Silent Voices: Lovestate with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus at The New Victory Theater in NYC. The Ensemble also continues its partnerships with the New York Public Library and Nokia Bell Labs Experiments in Art and Technology throughout the spring.

The Young People's Chorus of New York City (YPC) brings together two holiday traditions under the baton of Associate Artistic Director Elizabeth Nuñez, who conducts contemporary stagings of Benjamin Britten's Christmas cantata A Ceremony of Carols and Samuel Adler's Hanukkah cantata The Flames of Freedom at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday, December 9 at 3:00 p.m. Heard for the first time in New York City, The Flames of Freedom was composed as a musical counterpart to Britten's classic, and both works are explored on the program through sets, lighting, and choreography.

Soprano Julia Bullock is at the Met in New York this year--but not necessarily the one that comes to mind when you're thinking about performances by an opera singer. It's the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she kicked off her year as Artist-in-Residence (2018-2019) on Saturday night with “History's Persistent Voice,” the first in a series of five concerts.

San Francisco Opera announces the winner of the 2018 Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Emerging Stars Competition. Brazilian tenor Atalla Ayan, who made his Company debut as Alfredo in Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata last fall, was named “2018 Emerging Star of the Year” based on a popular vote conducted online at sfopera.com from July 9–July 31, 2018. As winner of the competition, now in its third year, Ayan receives a $10,000 cash prize.

Highlights this season include world premieres from Steve Reich, Unsuk Chin, Christopher Rouse, and Louis Andriessen, as well as major stage productions from Tod Machover and Meredith Monk.

Today, twenty-one arts leaders and activists announce the launch of Turn The Spotlight, a foundation created to pair top-tier mentors with exceptional women, people of color, and other equity-seeking groups in the arts. Beth Stewart, a New York City-based arts entrepreneur and classical music publicist, will lead the foundation, which is supported by an Advisory Board of arts world luminaries, including soprano Julia Bullock, journalists Anne Midgette and Celeste Headlee, conductors Lidiya Yankovskaya and Nicole Paiement, stage director Francesca Zambello, classical music publicist Mary Lou Falcone, arts advocates Monica Yunus and Camille Zamora, and women's rights advocate Amanda Mejia.

On July 28, 2018, 13 years after its premiere, Santa Fe Opera presented John Adams and Peter Sellars' DOCTOR ATOMIC. This new production featured bass-baritone Ryan McKinny as the volatile scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The opera, which takes place during the last few days before the first atomic bomb test, shows Oppenheimer battling with his mental demons as he tried to deal with the impending use of his scientific discovery to destroy an entire city and its inhabitants. McKinny showed the audience the human side of the scientific genius and I doubt that operagoers who saw his portrayal will soon forget it.