Julia Bullock’s upcoming summer 2026 engagements include Cincinnati May Festival directorship (May 15–23) & Carmen title role debut in Minnesota (Aug 14 & 16)
(April 2026) — 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).
Recent successes
Like her recital of songs based on the poetry of Langston Hughes, another program featured during Bullock’s 2018–19 Met residency was Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine, inspired by the life and art of Joséphine Baker and developed in collaboration with director Peter Sellars and composer Tyshawn Sorey. Bullock’s recent performances of the work at Australia’s Adelaide Festival earned raves, with Australian Stage declaring that “Bullock’s gorgeous, velvety voice has a huge range, which was richly exploited by Sorey’s music,” and Bachtrack concluding: “Overall this was Bullock’s show – brilliantly sung (mostly not operatically), danced and acted, providing not only a glimpse into the life of Joséphine Baker, but also that of all black women in white society.”
Julia Bullock: spring/summer 2026 engagements
May 15-23
Cincinnati, OH
Cincinnati May Festival
Festival Directorship
May 15
“AN ECLECTIC OPENING NIGHT”
Cristian Măcelaru, conductor
Julia Bullock, soprano
Carlos Simon, Hammond Organ
Jason Alexander Holmes, baritone/Preacher
May Festival Chorus, Matthew Swanson, director
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
BRUCKNER: Psalm 150
ZEMLINSKY: Selections from Symphonische Gesänge
“Lied aus Dixieland” (“Song from Dixieland”)
”Totes braunes Mädel (“To a Brown Girl Dead,” text by Countee Cullen)
“Übler Bursche” (“Bad Boy”)
“Erkenntnis” (“Disillusion”)
“Afrikanischer Tanz” (“African Dance”)
BONDS:
“To a Brown Girl Dead”
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
“Poème d’Automne” and “Winter Moon” from Songs of the Season
“April Rain”
ECLECTIC MASS: Selections from:
SIMON: Good News Mass and Sanctus
PALESTRINA: Missa Assumpta est Maria
BACH: Cantata No. 191
BONDS: Credo
HANDEL (arr. Mounsey): “Soulful Hallelujah”
May 16
“THE WATER’S JOURNEY”
Cristian Măcelaru, conductor
May Festival Chorus, Matthew Swanson, director
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
ELLINGTON: The River
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Symphony No. 1, A Sea Symphony
May 17
“A DREAM DEFERRED: LANGSTON HUGHES IN SONG”
Julia Bullock, soprano
May 21
“ON LOVE AND LUST”
Matthew Swanson, conductor
Victoria Okafor, soprano
Sara Couden, contralto
Nicholas Phan, tenor
Yannis François, bass-baritone
May Festival Chorus, Matthew Swanson, director
Members of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
Cincinnati Ballet – CB2 (Yoshihisa Arai, choreographer)
STRAVINSKY: Les noces (“The Wedding”)
ORFF: Catulli Carmina (“Songs of Catullus”)
May 23
“FESTIVAL FINALE: Porgy and Bess”
Anthony Parnther, conductor
Julia Bullock, soprano
Alfred Walker, bass-baritone
May Festival Chorus, Matthew Swanson, director
May Festival Youth Chorus, Jason Alexander Holmes, director
Classical Roots Community Choir, Jason Alexander Holmes, resident conductor
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra
G. GERSHWIN, DUBOSE & DOROTHY HEYWARD, IRA GERSHWIN: Selections from The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
STILL: Plain-Chant for America
Stephen PAULUS: From Prayers & Remembrances
V. In Beauty It Walks
VI. Eternity
BERNSTEIN: “Make our Garden Grow” from Candide
HANDEL: “Hallelujah Chorus” from Messiah
Aug 14 & 16
Brainerd, MN
Lakes Area Music Festival
BIZET: Carmen
Julia Bullock: Carmen
Paul Appleby: Don José
Evan Hughes: Escamillo
Katerina Burton: Micaëla
Christian Reif, conductor
Lisenka Heijboer Castañón, director