After a winter and spring of notable successes – including widely lauded performances of Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine at Australia’s Adelaide Festival – Grammy-winning American classical singer Julia Bullock looks forward to launching her summer season with a curatorial role as the Festival Director of Cincinnati’s May Festival, where she is also a featured soloist in the opening and closing programs (May 15–23). During the festival, Bullock will also give a performance of her recital titled “A Dream Deferred: Langston Hughes in Song” (May 17). Later in the summer, Bullock makes her role debut as the title character in Carmen at Minnesota’s Lakes Area Music Festival, joined in the cast by Paul Appleby, Evan Hughes, and Katerina Burton, and with her husband, Christian Reif, on the podium (Aug 14 & 16).
Festival Director of the Cincinnati May Festival
The New York Times hinted at the many facets of Bullock’s artistic personality when it called her “one of the singular artists of her generation – a singer of enveloping tone, startlingly mature presence and unusually sophisticated insight into culture, society and history.” Likewise, Musical America honored her as a 2021 Artist of the Year and “agent of change,” recognizing that, in addition to her onstage accomplishments, she is a prominent voice of social consciousness and activism. These qualities, added to her many strictly musical virtues, have led Bullock into a host of extended curatorial partnerships, to which this spring she adds the Festival Directorship of the 2026 Cincinnati May Festival, the oldest choral music festival in the Western Hemisphere (May 15–23).
The 2026 May Festival combines works from the festival’s history with works never performed by the May Festival Chorus before, as well as new visual elements and collaborations with local performing arts groups like the Cincinnati Ballet and the Classical Roots Community Choir. This year’s festival will also feature the most works by Black Americans and the largest overall diversity of composers in the festival’s history. Program highlights include selections from The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess crafted by Bullock, in which she performs as a soloist along with Alfred Walker; selections from Carlos Simon’s Good News Mass featuring organ improvisations from Simon himself, as part of an “Eclectic Mass” assemblage that also includes parts of Margaret Bonds’s Credo and music of Palestrina and Bach; a dialogue in song juxtaposing Alexander von Zemlinsky’s settings of Harlem Renaissance poets with songs by Margaret Bonds; Duke Ellington’s The River, which uses water as an allegory for life and spiritualty, paired with Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony; the rarely-performed chorus-ballets Les noces (“The Wedding”) by Igor Stravinsky and Catulli Carmina (“Songs of Catullus”) by Carl Orff, both with the Cincinnati Ballet; Bullock’s recital titled “A Dream Deferred: Langston Hughes in Song”; Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle sung by the Cincinnati Vocal Arts Ensemble; and much more. Conductors for the festival include Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Music Director Cristian Măcelaru, May Festival Director of Choruses Matthew Swanson, and guest conductor Anthony Parnther.
During the 2018–19 season, Bullock served as Artist in Residence for the performance series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first singer to be so invited, and one of the programs she developed for the residency was “A Dream Deferred: Langston Hughes in Song.” The program was a tribute to the flowering of culture during the Harlem Renaissance and to the neighborhood itself, an exploration of Hughes’s complicated feelings toward New York City, and a conversation of sorts, or perhaps counterproposal, to a notorious and widely protested 1969 exhibit at the Met called “Harlem on My Mind.” Bullock gives a performance of the program as an extra offering during the course of the 2026 May Festival (May 17).
Carmen at Minnesota’s Lakes Area Music Festival
Last spring, Bullock’s acclaimed performance in the title role of John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Metropolitan Opera earned her praise for “piercing intelligence and expressive nuance” (Opera Today). This summer she brings those qualities to a role she has not undertaken before, the title character in Carmen. Performed at Minnesota’s Lakes Area Music Festival, the opera also features Bullock’s fellow American Modern Opera Company (AMOC*) member Paul Appleby as Don José, bass-baritone Evan Hughes – who has also collaborated on multiple projects with AMOC* – as Escamillo, and recent George and Nora London Foundation Competition winner Katerina Burton as Micaëla. The production is helmed by Dutch Peruvian director Lisenka Heijboer Castañón, another recent collaborator with John Adams and AMOC* company members. Carmen will be conducted by Christian Reif, who returns each summer as Music Director of the Lakes Area Music Festival (Aug 14 & 16).