Julia Bulloock at Jordan Hall
Boston Modern Opera Project Brings Us an Intoxicating Mix
By: Susan Hall - Oct 28, 2026
Boston Modern Orchestra Project in Concert with Julia Bullock at Jordan Hall
November 6, 2026
Jordan Hall
Julia Bullock is one of the foremost sopranos of our time. She will perform at Jordan Hall with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on November 6th.
Ms. Bullock now lives in Munich, Germany, but returns frequently to her country of birth to sing songs that are particularly tied to this country. She will sing American composer Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer 1915. She speaks about singing as full of joy and pleasure. ck: “ I feel it more and more now. It’s becoming so empowering and freeing.”
Julia grew up with music around her in one of America’s music capitals: St.Louis Missouri. “We sang so much at home. There was always music in the house from recordings back early, early in my childhood and with my biological Dad and my Mom. Tina Turner was huge. I still love herI don’t want to believe in idols but I do have a few people I idolize. Tina Turner is one of them. I was listening to Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Judy Collins. The list goes on and on. Pink Floyd. Really heightened and feeling like my relationship to music was not casual. I’ve always felt ignited when I listened to music and when I made music I was moved emotionally by music, but also physically by music. I just feel it was always there."
Samuel Barber’s Knoxville 1915 is a prose poem originally written in 1935 and published in 1938. . James Agee's text was an experiment in rapid, free-form, improvisational writing. He claimed to have written it in a feverish 90 minutes.The Core The piece captures "a child's feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep".
The text moves seamlessly between high sensory detail and profound existential questioning:
Barber occupies a distinctive place as a modern romanticist. He was surrounded by music since childhood; his maternal aunt, Louise Homer, was a famous contralto singer; her husband, a respectable song composer. When Barber was seven years old, he sent this note to his mother: "I was not meant to be an athlete, but a composer, and I will be, I am sure. Don't ask me to go and play football." He had already learned to play the cello. Later he became proficient as a pianist. He also studied singing quite seriously, and even sang the baritone solo in a recording of his own work, Dover Beach. This recording, issued by RCA Victor, is now a collector's item.
In Agee's prose poem, a small boy, lying in the grass at his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, listens to the sounds around him. He hears the "iron moan" of a passing streetcar, with "the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks." Looking at the sky, he thinks of the sorrows of life on earth, and says a prayer: "May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father…" With this prayer he is put to bed. Agee's reminiscence is precisely autobiographical, for in 1915 he was six years old.
The music possesses an immediate sense of childhood memories; the singing line is a natural translation of words into music. The child's train of thought, with its sudden shifts of emotional concentration, is reflected in the gentle changes in the character of the music. Diatonic modalities, articulated by mysterious cadences and plagal harmonic inflections, create the needed ambiance of nostalgic recollection. Occasional metaharmonies and the pointed sharpness of the rhythms do not perturb the luminous euphony of the music. There are also touches of illustrative onomatopeia, as in the unusual effect of pizzicati glissando in the lower strings to represent the electric sparks of the streetcar antenna.
Ms Bullock will also sing sections of Matthew AuCoin's The No One’s Rose .
The program starts with Anthony De Ritis’s Jiggedy, Jingle, Jaunty, Jaunty, a world premiere for orchestra and electronics, and pays homage to James Joyce and Luciano Berio ,through a dialogue that stretches across time. Also included is Charles Wuorinen’s Delight of the Muses, a homage to Mozart based on material from Don Giovanni. Outlandish, sentimental, and a rousing good time, shows this iconic American composer at his irreverent best.
WQXR has said of the mastermind of this program, Gil Rose: “Gil Rose is not just a fine conductor, but a peerless curator, sniffing out—and commissioning—off-trend, unheralded, and otherwise underplayed repertoire that nevertheless holds to unfailingly high standards of quality. In doing so, he’s built an unmistakable, yet indefinable, personal aesthetic”
Tickets available here