It feels appropriate that Julia Bullock now bills herself as a “classical singer” rather than a traditional soprano. I don’t say this just because the American artist sounds more comfortable and secure these days in the lower end of her range. Rather, she seems entirely uninterested in the traditional career progression of an opera singer, or in delivering the kind of recital one might expect from a musician steeped in the genre. The program she devised with pianist Bretton Brown and brought to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society eschewed the expected assemblage of arias and Lieder, favoring instead the folk song, showtune and spiritual amid more obvious choices. The results were uneven on an interpretive level, but the total effect made for a fascinating evening, nonetheless.
Bullock thrived in music with ties to the American Roots tradition. The concert’s highlight, a world-weary rendition of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, spoke directly to the atrocities that continue to plague society. In remarks from the stage, Bullock said she was inspired to perform the piece in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which occurred shortly before she learned she was pregnant with her first child. The lyrics that question the morality of bringing a child into a fraught world thus took on deep meaning. Her arrangement was inspired by the folk legend Odetta, and Bullock uncannily approximated her dark, earthy contralto, which also served her well for a rendition of Dvořák’s Goin’ Home.
The rediscovered singer-songwriter Connie Converse has long been a staple of Bullock’s repertoire, and the simple, enigmatic music Converse produced sounded entirely natural when grouped with art songs by Samuel Barber. Barber’s evocation of young love in My Lizard and The Daisies took on a wry sensibility when placed next to Converse’s Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains) and I Have Considered the Lilies, which chronicle romantic entanglements that have hit the skids. Vocally, Bullock charted the course from eager youthfulness to jaded resignation, although high notes in the more traditionally scored art songs were hard won. Brown’s accompaniment was ecstatic in Barber, mournful in Converse. The concert closed with an arrangement of Converse’s How Sad, How Lonely, simple and unadorned.
Not all ideas came together harmoniously. A suite of music built around Richard Strauss’s Drei Lieder der Ophelia, and purporting to analyze the Shakespearean character’s lack of agency, seemed underdeveloped. Placing these Lieder next to other songs that simply evoke the concert of water – the spiritual Deep River, Kurt Weill’s Ballade vom ertrunkenen Mädchen – was clever but facile, like an underground thesis that sounds smarter than it actually is. Bullock brought a poignant resonance to the familiar Harry Burleigh arrangement of the spiritual but struggled to project both voice and text in the Strauss.
A series of songs from South Pacific lacked the irony and bite with which Rodgers and Hammerstein infused their music. They merely sounded pretty. Bullock also struggled with the rhythmic patter of several musical theater numbers, including Happily Ever After from Once Upon a Mattress (written by Richard Rodgers’ daughter, Mary) and Kurt Weill’s The Princess of Pure Delight. The Sprechgesang demands of Weill’s Song of the Hard Nut seemed outside her comfort zone, although she nailed the wit of Poulenc’s Non, Monsieur mon mari with a cabaret artist’s vigor.
Perhaps the evening’s most surprising selection was a short, spoken piece from Marian Anderson’s album Jus’ Keep On Singin’. “I done come a long ways / and I got a long long way to go”, the simple text reads. Given her intelligence and talent, there is no doubt Bullock will go a long way too.
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