As artist-in-residence of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018-19, Bullock devised a new chamber orchestral arrangement of El Niño with contributions from her husband, Christian Reif. Alongside colleagues from the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC), she premiered this distilled rendering at New York’s Met Cloisters, where her fellow soloists were Davóne Tines and J’Nai Bridges, as for her upcoming Met debut. The New York Times reported:

“With these three singers, El Niño was in safe hands. … Ms. Bullock, her voice by turns warm and teeming with urgency, felt at times larger than the chapel itself. … And the way she programmed El Niño elevated an already-revisionist work to something much more powerful.”

Titled El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, Reif’s arrangement of the work is the vehicle for a series of Bullock’s fall engagements. The first of these is with the Cincinnati Symphony, where Reif – “a conductor of considerable stature” (San Francisco Chronicle) – conducts a performance featuring contralto Jasmin White and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo alongside Bullock and Tines (Nov 30). Next, with Reif and AMOC, Bullock takes Nativity Reconsidered on a seasonal four-city U.S. tour. Together with Tines, Roth Constanzo and White, she reprises the work at Kansas City’s Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral (Dec 11), Stanford University (Dec 13), Yale University (Dec 15) and New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine (Dec 21).